Top Stories of 2024: Illumina, Pistoia Alliance, Generative AI, Sequencing, More
January 3, 2025 | Last year, the world of biotech achieved much with AI, sequencing, treatment development, and more. The Trends from the Trenches podcast also covered data management strategies, embracing change, and the technologies driving data-intensive science.
To kick off the new year, here are the top stories and top podcast episodes of 2024 from Bio-IT World and Trends from the Trenches. – The Editors
The 2024 Innovative Practices Awards winners were announced, and six projects were honored. Companies driving the winning entries included AstraZeneca, DNAnexus, Pistoia Alliance, Regeneron, Tempus, and UK Biobank.
lllumina unveiled its MiSeq i100 Series of sequencing systems, comprising two new benchtop instruments: MiSeq i100 and MiSeq i100 Plus Systems. The new sequencing systems are said to offer an affordable, comprehensive solution that is simple to understand and use, even for those with limited NGS expertise.
Pistoia Alliance distributed a survey to 200 R&D experts from life science start-ups to large pharma companies across Europe, North America, South America, and the Asia-Pacific region. The survey included questions examining priority investment areas, barriers to implementing technology, and the benefits organizations expect to gain from digitalizing, according to Becky Upton, president of the Pistoia Alliance.
NVIDIA at JP Morgan: Generative AI and the Computer Aided Drug Design Tipping Point and Illumina at JP Morgan: Tighter Focus, Consumable Growth, Short Read Market
At the 2024 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, NVIDIA’s Kimberly Powell and Illumina’s Jacob Thaysen gave presentations that covered generative AI’s impact on drug discovery and tools and resources meant to help with sequencing, analyzation, and more, respectively. Both also discussed their companies’ goals for 2024.
During Oxford Nanopore’s user conference, London Calling, CTO Clive Brown reflected on his 2012 presentation at AGBT and discussed how far Nanopore has gone: whole-chromosome sequencing, flow cell loading without a pipette, and advances in chemistry, electrical engineering, and commercial format. He also highlights their ambitious plans for the future.
Recursion and Novo Nordisk created a new foundation model for chemistry called MolE. Short for Molecular Embeddings, MoleE is a model that learns molecular embeddings, at the atomic environment level, directly from a molecular graph using a transformer and retains the position of each atom relative to others in the molecular structure.
In some of its latest applications, generative AI has been used in designing molecules with insights produced at a scale and speed not possible with traditional deep learning methods alone, according to Marinka Zitnik, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School. The potential of AI to aid in the development of new drugs to cure disease is enormous, given the size of the chemical universe (1060 chemical compounds) relative to the tiny fraction (105) that has been synthesized in the lab as drugs approved for use by the FDA.
Researchers from the University of Adelaide (Australia) and the Columbia University (New York) have “reimagined” osteoarthritis, providing a pharmaceutical target for the discovery of drugs to reverse and treat the ubiquitous degenerative joint disease. Osteoarthritis was originally believed to be a “wear and tear” condition, which wrongly implies that its progression is a matter of time and inevitable, according to Jia Ng, senior research commercialization associate at AusHealth.
One of the biggest backlashes of insulin therapy is the risk of hypoglycemia. The emergence of an oral nanotherapeutic formulation of insulin brings the possibility of reducing, or even eliminating, hypoglycemic events, as suggested by results of a study co-lead by Nicholas Hunt, Ph.D., senior lecturer in the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Sydney (Australia).
The creation of an HIV-like virus particle that both reduces viral reservoirs and boosts the immune system could make it possible for at least half of all patients to achieve long-term control of the virus after a brief stint of treatment. At least, that’s the hope of Yuntao Wu, Ph.D., professor in the Center for Infectious Disease Research at George Mason University, buoyed by findings of a proof-of-concept study in rhesus macaques.
Scientists in Europe collaborated on the first international-level clinical study using secure multiparty computation (MPC), which enabled cross-border cooperation without sharing any personalized health data. Hendrik Ballhausen, Ph.D., head of research administration at LMU University Hospital in Munich, Germany, and one of the lead players on the initiative, elaborated on the project.
Top Episodes from the Trends from the Trenches Podcast
This year, the Trends from the Trenches podcast also covered various news from the industry.
The industry is drowning in data, which is why data management strategies are needed now more than ever. In this episode, host Stan Gloss speaks with Pistoia Alliance president Becky Upton about maximizing data management efficiency, harnessing AI to expedite R&D, and the challenges of setting standards.
In an ever-evolving world, change can bring new opportunities and lead to growth and innovation. In this episode of Trends from the Trenches, Stan Gloss and Adama Ibrahim, VP of Digital Strategy and Change Management at Novo Nordisk, have a conversation around humanity’s natural resistance to change, why the resistance must be overcome, and how change is the key to progress.
In this episode of Trends from the Trenches, host Stan Gloss speaks with Joseph La Barge, CEO of Apertura Gene Therapy, about his beginnings in law, setting off on the entrepreneurship journey, gene expression and capsid engineering, and more.
This special episode Trends from the Trenches was taken from the Trends from the Trenches session at Bio-IT World Conference & Expo 2024. BioTeam CEO Ari Berman delivers a candid talk about the technologies driving data-intensive science, from the most worthwhile to the most overhyped to the most relevant, as well as computing, storage, data transfer, and more.
In this episode, host Stan Gloss and Ruth Marinshaw, CTO of Research Computing at Stanford University, talk about the accomplishments and challenges of supporting a diverse population of researchers in academia, as well as building a reliable and trustworthy service, AI’s impact, and more.