#BioIT18 News, Notes, And Coverage
June 8, 2018 | Last month in Boston, over 3,500 members of the biotech and life science industries came together to share thoughts, insights, and technologies during the 2018 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. The conference featured 16 tracks including Bioinformatics, FAIR Data for Genomic Applications, Data Transfer, Clinical Genomics, Next-Gen Sequencing Informatics, and more. We—and others—have been busy covering what we saw and heard at the event. –The Editors
News & Product Briefs
Google Cloud showcased new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) products as well as new deployments on GCP: BC Platforms bringing GeneVisison; Firecloud from the Broad Institute; Dell EMC Isilon; Seven Bridges; and more.
Illumina announced its acquisition of Edico Genome for $100 million. Tousi says that Edico’s ability to build the DRAGEN platform into a solution for the acceleration of secondary analysis played a key role in Illumina’s interest in the company. “We wanted to show that we’re focusing on informatics solutions for the community and this just seemed like the perfect venue,” Susan Tousi, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Illumina, told Bio-IT World. Read our coverage.
Wasabi introduced 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. Press Release.
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. Press release.
PerkinElmer’s 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 announced three pre-built deep learning analytics modules for its Cortex software. 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. Press release.
Linguamatics launched iScite, a product that puts the precision and power of Linguamatics artificial intelligence (AI) technology directly into the hands of scientists, researchers and other knowledge workers. Press release. The product went on to win the Bio-IT World Best of Show Judges’ Prize.
Genestack announced two new modules for its biodata platform. 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.
DDN and Parabricks announced the availability of a jointly-integrated technology solution that provides massive acceleration for analysis of human genomes. The platform combines full saturation of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) with DDN’s Parallel Flash Data Platforms for fastest time to results, and enables unprecedented capabilities for high-throughput genomics analysis pipelines. Press Release
Bio-IT World Coverage
Mark Boguski announced a population sequencing project in Thailand that he says is bound to succeed where attempts elsewhere have fallen flat.
The Data Science panel took on the definitions of data science as well as some of the company structures needed to make it work.
The BioTeam hosted a panel and talked about some of the challenges and solutions for cross disciplinary training, as well AI, blockchain, and other buzzwords.
Hiring managers talked details about what they’re looking for in Big Data jobs, and whether or not you need a Ph.D. to get a data science job.
Bio-IT World hosted its second Hackathon this year. Four teams took the opportunity to analyze pre-established datasets from the Memorial Sloan Kettering and Dana Farber Cancer Center, the Broad Institute, Collaborative Drug Discovery, and the Jackson Laboratory and report their work and findings.
Data are forever, and managing storage and migration is no inconsequential task.
Our reporters’ notebook holds everything that didn’t fit elsewhere: a collection of bits and pieces that stuck with us.
Awards
Judges named six 2018 Bio-IT World Best of Show winners, and the Bio-IT World community again chose a People’s Choice winner. OnRamp BioInformatics was honored for ROSALIND as the People’s Choice winner. The Hyve won Data Integration & Management honors for RADAR-base. Sinequa won the Analysis & Data Computing award for Sinequa ES v10. Diploid’s Moon 1.0 won the Genomic Data Services prize. Nanome won in the Data Visualization & Exploration category for NanoPro. PetaGene’s Cloud Edition - Version 1.2 was named the Storage Infrastructure & Hardware winner. And Linguamatics was honored with the first Judges’ Prize for iScite 2.0.
Five projects were deemed industry best practices by the judges of the Bio-IT World Best Practices Awards. The honored companies were Takeda Pharmaceuticals nominated by Deloitte; AstraZeneca, Discovery Sciences, IMED Biotech Unit nominated by Genedata; Celgene; Center for Innovation and Bioinformatics, Neurological Clinical Research Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital; and Alexion Pharmaceuticals nominated by EPAM Systems. Honorable mentions were given to Pfizer, SciBite, and The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine.