Bio-IT World Names 2023 Innovative Practices Winners

April 19, 2023 | Bio-IT World today announced the 2023 Innovative Practices Awards winners. Six projects were honored. Companies involved in the winning entries included AbbVie, Bayer G4A; Carenostics; City of Hope; Generate Biomedicines; Hackensack Meridian Health; Higher Steaks; Regeneron Pharmaceuticals; SciBite; and Synthace.

The awards ceremony will be held during the opening plenary program on Tuesday, May 16, at the 2023 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston.

Since 2003, Bio-IT World has hosted an elite awards program with the goal of highlighting outstanding examples of how technology innovations and strategic initiatives can be applied to advance life sciences research. This year’s winning projects represent excellence in innovation in the categories of Informatics, Personalized & Translational Medicine, Knowledge Management, Research, Laboratory Technology, and Clinical Diagnostics

“Each year, the Innovative Practices Awards call out the highest levels of collaboration and creativity,” said Allison Proffitt, Bio-IT World Editorial Director. “This year, our panel of peer judges was particularly impressed with data commons efforts, augmented design experiments, and proven efforts to streamline and optimize the research progress.”

2023 Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Awards Winners

Here are the six winning groups and their projects, as described in their own words.

AbbVie
Read more about the project: AbbVie R&D Convergence Hub (ARCH)

The AbbVie R&D Convergence Hub (ARCH), is driving convergence in AbbVie R&D as a central knowledge platform that brings together harmonized, normalized, and curated data from over 170 internal and external sources. Giving scientists across R&D access to this integrated knowledge platform provides them unparalleled access and potential to extract insights and generate hypotheses in novel and powerful ways. Helping AbbVie’s community of researchers to access this knowledge faster, easier, and in automated ways is leading towards a goal to double the productivity of AbbVie R&D. Ultimately, the ARCH and the applications and utilities developed from it are already helping AbbVie to deliver innovative medicines and solutions to patients.

City of Hope nominated by SciBite Limited
Read more about the project: POSEIDON - Precision Oncology Software Environment Interoperable Data Ontologies Network

Precision Oncology Software Environment Interoperable Data Ontologies Network (POSEIDON) is an enterprise-wide data platform developed by The City of Hope Research Informatics and the Center for Precision Medicine to support their precision medicine program. Built on the DNAnexus technology stack with custom features and functionality created by City of Hope Research Informatics, POSEIDON unifies patient data and comprehensive germline and somatic genomic profiling for every patient, supporting data from more than 670,000 patients. Within the POSEIDON platform, SciBite supports data harmonization; with data standards being managed with CENtree, SciBite’s award winning ontology management platform and normalization being provided by SciBite’s named entity recognition engine, TERMite. POSEIDON enables de-identified and harmonized clinical and multi-omic data to be analysed and visualised by researchers, supporting cohort discovery and exploration as well as preliminary feasibility testing to derive patient specific insights from real world data (RWD) and real-word evidence (RWE). POSEIDON supports clinico-genomic research at City of Hope, driving the development of more effective therapeutics and improving outcomes.

Generate Biomedicines
Read more about the project: Intrinsically Digital, Audaciously Ambitious: Building a data platform to support ML-driven drug discovery

Generate Biomedicines’ goal of leveraging machine-learning powered generative biology to discover and develop new drugs faster and cheaper is supported by an integrated and cohesive R&D data platform. This platform creates a common source of truth for the research organization with robust and nimble data modeling capabilities, flexible integrations with third-party software, and a core suite of powerful tools designed to streamline research and maximize the value of experimental results. FAIR to its core, this integrated data platform leverages industry best practices and lessons-learned from a talented team of informatics engineers to form the critical foundation of a unique company with equal parts “bio” and “tech”.

The Hackensack Meridian Health & Carenostics CKD Collaboration, nominated by Bayer G4A
Read more about the project: AI for earlier clinical intervention in chronic kidney disease

Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) is a leading cause of mortality, affecting >800M people worldwide. Early detection and intervention have been shown to slow disease progression, saving lives and reducing costs. Unfortunately, ~85% of CKD cases are estimated to be undiagnosed. To tackle this, Carenostics has developed machine learning (ML) models that have retrospectively identified 50% of the undiagnosed CKD population at 3x the specificity of current testing practices. Carenostics is deploying these models into clinical practice at Hackensack Meridian Health (HMH), an 18-hospital health system with >6M patient records. The solution identifies undiagnosed & untreated CKD patients using existing EHR data, addresses health inequities through bias-adjusted ML, and activates clinicians with an intuitive, EHR-integrated interface. In the next 12 months, Carenostics projects to help HMH diagnose 50,000 previously undiagnosed CKD patients and will expand its platform to help HMH identify and proactively treat patients with other chronic diseases.

Higher Steaks nominated by Synthace
Read more about the project: DOE-led media optimization for porcine stem cell lines

HigherSteaks is a lab-grown meat company on a mission to reduce traditional meat consumption by having a 5% share of the global pork market by 2030. HigherSteaks is ushering in a new era of sustainable food production through lab-grown meat and is doing so through design of experiments (DOE) to accelerate media optimization, and by running factor screens based on different cell lines of porcine stem cells. Synthace, a life sciences SaaS platform, and HigherSteaks’ core experimental solution, allows them to use DOE and fractional factorials—screening 22 factors, as well as interaction profiles, in only 320 experimental runs. Synthace saved HigherSteaks 6-9 months of work and delivered an optimized media for pig stem cells 15x cheaper compared to commercial media. This experiment proves the concept, and demonstrates the viability, of DOE methodologies for the cultured meat sector, without additional lab investment.

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals
Read more about the project: Regeneron Optimization of Instruments (ROI)

Regeneron's Research and Preclinical Development organization invests millions of dollars each year to acquire and operate specialized lab instruments that support scientists in the discovery of potential new medicines. To optimize the usage of these instruments across finite lab space, a project was undertaken to measure instrument utilization. We sought to answer questions like: Are there opportunities to better utilize existing instruments? and Could we plan and budget more effectively if we better understood existing instrument usage? Additionally, this data enables new  opportunities to optimize instrument maintenance and other lab processes to increase the likelihood Regeneron is achieving the most value from its investments. Regeneron is now measuring utilization across 600 of the most expensive and/or lab space constrained instruments and using this data to make informed decisions to change processes or defer capital purchases that optimize utilization of a given instrument.