#BioIT18: What To Do, What To See

May 15, 2018 | Unless you’ve already been soaking up the pre-conference workshops, today marks the first day of the 2018 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. We have a full slate of talks, panels, and awards programs that will be sure to keep us excited about what is happening in the life sciences, biotech, and IT industries. Keep an eye on the @BioITWorld Twitter handle and the #BioIT18 tag to stay up to date, but to get you started, here’s what to look out for onsite, and some of the first news and product announcements of the week. –The Editors

The opening plenary address starts the main event on Tuesday evening. Mark Boguski will take on Skipping the Landline - Creating a New Healthcare Ecosystem Spanning Population Health to Individualized Care. Wednesday morning opens with a Data Science Panel featuring Tanya Cashorali of TCB Analytics, John Reynders of Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Jerald S. Schindler of Alkermes, and Lihua Yu of H3 Biomedicine. The Data Science panel is already sourcing questions. Visit Slido.com event #B117. Finally, Carl Zimmer will explore the complexity and controversy in his Thursday morning keynote presentation and will sign copies of his not-yet-released book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, afterward.

Need a cheat sheet on the Bio-IT World Awards programs? The Best of Show awards program honors the best new products in life sciences. The People’s Choice Award, part of Best of Show, is open for community voting starting on Tuesday evening. The Benjamin Franklin Award, given by Bioinformatics.org, honors open access in the life sciences. The 2018 winner, Desmond Higgins, will give his laureate address on Thursday morning. Finally, the Bio-IT World Best Practices Awards honor collaborations & solutions in life sciences and clinical trials. These awards are named live on Thursday morning; finalists have been announced.

The 2018 Bio-IT World Hackathon started yesterday morning, and is already rolling. If you’re just joining us, get some background on the Hackathon, and then check out the FAIR Data track.

In addition to talks in 15 different program tracks (here are some recommendations to get you started), there are hundreds of companies, institutes, and organizations will also be on the floor of the exhibit hall, promoting new technologies, services, and partnerships. We’ve flagged just a few of these announcements that have caught our attention leading up to another fantastic event:

Google Cloud will showcase their new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) products such as Variant Transforms, which helps organizations structure genomic variant data in BigQuery. Google Cloud will also promote new partnerships, including BC Platforms bringing GeneVisison, their end-to-end SaaS solution, to GCP; Firecloud from the Broad Institute, which uses Cromwell to leverage the Google Genomics API Pipelines component to run secondary analysis pipelines at scale; Dell EMC, which is offering their Dell EMC Isilon, a scale-out NAS platform, on the GCP; Seven Bridges, who now offers hundreds of genomics tools, workflows, and datasets on the GCP in a secure managed environment; and more.

Wasabi will introduce the Wasabi Ball transfer appliance, a simple, portable plug-and-play data transport solution that allows users to transfer large-scale datasets to and from Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. Wasabi Ball addresses common challenges associated with large-scale data transfers by eliminating the high network costs and long transfer times often associated with moving large data amounts over the internet. Powered by NETGEAR's industry-leading NAS performance capabilities and based on NETGEAR's RN628X Network Attached Storage (NAS) System, Wasabi Ball is a high-capacity mobile appliance that connects directly to a company's network for uploading data. Once loaded, a single Wasabi Ball can transport up to 87 terabytes of data per appliance. Multiple appliances can be used in parallel to transfer petabytes of data into, or out of, Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. Wasabi Ball is a highly secure, tamper-resistant appliance that automatically encrypts the stored data using AES 256-bit volume-based encryption, designed to ensure data security and chain-of-custody throughout the transfer process.

Illumina announced its acquisition of Edico Genome. Edico Genome’s DRAGEN Bio-IT Platform (DRAGEN) uses field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology in conjunction with proprietary software algorithms to reduce both data footprint and time to results. DRAGEN can be run on premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid mode, and is flexible and compatible for use with multiple cloud storage solutions and analysis pipelines. Edico Genome has built a strong base of NGS customers who have incorporated DRAGEN as a standard part of their sequencing workflow. Illumina is presenting alongside Edico Genome in the exhibit hall.

Dotmatics announced Bioregister 3.0, a major update to the company’s web-based system for registering and managing biological entities used in the development of novel biologic compounds. The latest version of Bioregister expands on previous releases with new capabilities for non-natural and chemically-modified biologics, enhanced entity relationship tracking, and easier setup and maintenance, making Bioregister 3.0 one of the most comprehensive biologics registration systems on the market. In today's research environment the roles of biologist and chemist are crossing over. As biologists employ chemistry and chemists use biology, a registration system that is versatile, extensible and capable of capturing a wide range of entities is essential. "It is critical for organizations developing new biologics-based therapeutics to protect their intellectual property by identifying, characterizing, and tracking uniqueness across a broad range of entity types," said Andrew LeBeau, Dotmatics senior manager of biologics marketing, in a press release. "Bioregister 3.0 offers users a fully functional, comprehensive system that is reliable, easy to use and integrates seamlessly with the Dotmatics suite and other informatics environments."

PerkinElmer will display its informatics solutions for biomedical and drug discovery applications – including its newly introduced PerkinElmer Signals Screening platform – at the 2018 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. PerkinElmer will also highlight several offerings at the event, including: PerkinElmer Signals Medical Review: A Bio-IT World Conference “Best of Show” finalist; PerkinElmer Signals Notebook: Another Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Best of Show nominee; PerkinElmer Signals Translational: A platform that enables the complete precision medicine workflow from data acquisition to biomarker discovery and validation; PerkinElmer Signals Lead Discovery: enables instant access to the scientific data so scientists can discover better drugs faster and is powered by Attivio and TIBCO Spotfire software.

Vyasa Analytics has announced three pre-built deep learning analytics modules for its Cortex software at Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. Cortex enables the secure, scalable application of deep learning-based artificial intelligence (AI) analytics to enterprise data, identifying patterns, relationships and concepts across disparate data sources. The new Neural Concept Recognition, Image Analytics and ChemVector analytics modules in Cortex enable life sciences organizations to quickly and easily apply deep learning analytics to large data streams of text, images and chemical structures. Like all deep learning analytical modules in Cortex’s library, these new modules allow users to ask complex questions of their data and use the answers to gain critical insights. “Life sciences and healthcare organizations are using AI tools to advance research and development and deliver better patient care. Deep learning algorithms provide a set of powerful approaches that help us apply analytics more effectively and comprehensively across large scale data sources,” said Christopher Bouton, founder and CEO of Vyasa, in a press release. “The idea of AI has been around for decades, but we are now experiencing a perfect storm of GPU-based computing power, deep learning algorithm advances and highly scalable data sources that enables paradigm-shifting machine learning and analytics capabilities.” Vyasa will be demoing three deep learning analytics modules for Cortex at Bio-IT World 2018 in Boston from May 15 to 17, including: Neural Concept Recognition; Life Sciences R&D Specialized Image Analytics; and ChemVector de novo Compound Design.

Linguamatics announced the launch of Linguamatics iScite, a breakthrough innovation in scientific search that puts the precision and power of Linguamatics artificial intelligence (AI) technology directly into the hands of scientists, researchers and other knowledge workers. iScite offers a modern, easy-to-use scientific search engine that provides intuitive access to AI-powered searches across key biomedical data sources and delivers insightful answers to search questions. iScite is designed as a next-generation search experience that empowers non-technical users to conduct their own NLP-based scientific searches to extract data insights. Rather than rely on time- and/or resource-crunched technical experts to create and perform searches, iScite enables users to quickly and independently find precise answers to their high-value questions. “Traditional search methods are often time-consuming, expensive and ineffective, and the results are imprecise and difficult to sift through,” said Jane Reed, head of life science strategy for Linguamatics, in a press release. “With iScite, users can take advantage of the power of NLP without the traditional complexities. Our patent-pending Answer-Routing Engine interprets users’ search terms and guides them to the best possible answers to their questions. Searches are seamless across multiple content sources, and users are quickly pointed to the exact content relevant to their search without having to laboriously read through every word of the source documents.”

Frustrated that their discovery scientists spend more time looking for and preparing relevant omics data than analyzing it, Genestack’s pharmaceutical clients challenged the company to solve this industry problem. The result is two new modules for its biodata platform, which will both be previewed at Bio-IT World Conference 2018. The omics data manager module allows biologists to interrogate and visualize transcriptomics data at scale, and the expression data miner module supports users to collaborate on omics studies to speed up research and enable data re-use and meta-analysis. Genestack’s platform has a rich metadata system, which enables both proprietary and public data and metadata to be captured, described consistently and stored securely in a centralized location ready to be used for studies. Genestack’s mission is to help scientists make decisions. Its omics data management platform, with its new modules, is set to free discovery scientists and bioinformaticians to concentrate on the challenges that will bring greatest value to their organizations. Genestack CEO, Misha Kapushesky, will be discussing how creating a collaborative ecosystem of multi-vendor systems can offer the best solution for discovery science, in the Pharmaceutical R&D Informatics Track of the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo 2018 on Wednesday 16 May at 2.55pm. Genestack is also on stand 436 and the new modules will be available to trial in Summer 2018.