Bio-IT World Contributed Commentary | Healthcare companies, especially in growth phase, must be able to demonstrate the ability to comply with the laws that control their business and to identify fissures in operations quickly. Entrepreneurs and investors should therefore view compliance as a competitive advantage that puts the company in a favorable position to avoid—and swiftly and effectively to tackle—potential regulatory challenges.

Bio-IT World | Medidata Solutions has launched Acorn AI, a Medidata company dedicated to making "data liquid across the end-to-end lifecycle of a pharmaceutical and life sciences company—from research all the way to development and into post-market."

Bio-IT World | The Bio-IT World Conference & Expo recently hosted the third annual Bio-IT FAIR Data Hackathon, giving experts in life sciences and IT the opportunity to FAIR-ify a range of existing data sets.

Bio-IT World  In February, the 20th European nation signed the European Declaration, an effort to sequence and provide transnational access to at least one million human genomes by 2022—putting to rest any lingering doubts about the breadth of our data sharing challenges and the importance of international standards. The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health is at the forefront of the work.  

Bio-IT World | An "AI in Practice" keynote panel session at the recent Bio-IT World Congress & Expo in Boston discusses the efficiencies machine learning is creating in drug development, as well as the overall AI strategy companies are still formulating.

Bio-IT World | In his keynote presentation during opening ceremonies of the 18th Annual Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, John Wilbanks, chief commons officer of Merck spinoff Sage Bionetworks, explained how the business of research has traditionally focused on producing academic papers, limiting the growth of scientific knowledge to "massive incrementalism" around a succession of magic-bullet solutions—microassays, human genome project, robotics and artificial intelligence and, most recently, open science.