Diseases come in many forms, as do data. Real-time data derived from the Internet, social media, and other digital sources have the potential to provide timely and detailed information on disease threats or outbreaks. Curated databases provide population dynamics to aid in understanding mechanisms underlying human disease onset and progression. Meanwhile, electronic health records serve as a resource for monitoring individual disease therapies, outcomes, and adverse drug reactions. Track 15 explores how these disparate data can be monitored and modeled to understand disease progression and to mitigate disease progression individually, locally, and globally.

Tuesday, May 15

7:00 am Workshop Registration Open and Morning Coffee

8:00 – 11:30 Recommended Morning Pre-Conference Workshops*

W5. Data Visualization to Accelerate Biological Discovery

12:30 – 4:00 pm Recommended Afternoon Pre-Conference Workshops*

W12. Bio-IT IOT Workshop

* Separate registration required.

2:00 – 6:30 Main Conference Registration Open

4:00 PLENARY KEYNOTE SESSION

5:00 – 7:00 Welcome Reception in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing

Wednesday, May 16

7:00 am Registration Open and Morning Coffee

8:00 PLENARY KEYNOTE SESSION

9:45 Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing

POPULATION INFORMATICS AND ANALYTICS

10:50 Chairperson’s Remarks

11:00 Lineage: Visualizing Multivariate Clinical Data in Genealogy Graphs

Alexander Lex, PhD, Assistant Professor, SCI Institute, School of Computing, University of Utah

The majority of diseases that are a significant challenge for public and individual heath are caused by a combination of hereditary and environmental factors. In this presentation, we introduce Lineage, a novel visual analysis tool, designed to support domain experts that study such multifactorial diseases in the context of genealogies. Incorporating familial relationships between cases can provide insights into shared genomic variants that could be implicated in diseases, but also into shared environmental exposures.

11:30 Creating Population Health Informatics Using Tableau

Frank Wang, Clinical Assistant Professor, Health Informatics and Health Sciences, Sacred Heart University

Population Health Management and Accountable Care Organizations (ACO) are key initiatives under Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA). CMS has developed guidelines to reward quality of care and better outcome. This topic reviews CMS datasets (Medicare Utilization and Reimbursement, Part B and Part D pharmaceutical products usage and clinical quality improvement) and demonstrates how to use Tableau to derive actionable insights in healthcare informatics and analytics.

12:00 pm Sponsored Presentation (Opportunity Available)

12:30 Session Break

12:40 Luncheon Presentation (Sponsorship Opportunity Available) or Enjoy Lunch on Your Own

1:40 Session Break

MINING DISPARATE DATA FOR DISEASE MONITORING

1:50 Chairperson’s Remarks

Dennis A. Steindler, PhD, Senior Investigator and Director, Neuroscience and Aging Lab, Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging; Professor, Nutrition, The Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy; Senior Scientist, CTSI, Tufts University

1:55 Pathogen Genomics in Public Health

Duncan R. MacCannell, PhD, CSO, Office of Advanced Molecular Detection, National Center for Emerging & Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Microbial genomics is playing a rapidly increasing role in public health, from detecting and responding to outbreaks, to providing better data for disease surveillance, to monitoring the impact of vaccines, to developing a new generation of diagnostics. This presentation provides an overview of how next-generation sequencing is transforming infectious disease public health in the United States.

2:15 Genomics-Guided Pathogen Surveillance and Outbreak Response

Hayden Metsky, Graduate Research Assistant, Sabeti Lab, Broad Institute, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Deep sequencing of viral genomes has offered key insights into the evolution and spread of human viral pathogens. I talk in particular about how genome sequencing has informed our understanding of the 2015-2016 Zika virus epidemic on a global scale, and of a recent mumps outbreak in Massachusetts at a high resolution. But there are many difficulties to overcome in order to realize more effective pathogen surveillance and outbreak response, and I discuss emerging genomic technologies that offer promising solutions to these challenges.

2:35 “Perfect Storm” Components, Including Infectious Disease and Stem Cell Pathologies, Omics and Their Contributions to Degenerative and Neoplastic Disease

Dennis A. Steindler, PhD, Senior Investigator and Director, Neuroscience and Aging Lab, Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging; Professor, Nutrition, The Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy; Senior Scientist, CTSI, Tufts University

There are common elements and mechanisms involved in degenerative and neoplastic diseases. Within a “perfect storm” of components that contribute to neurodegenerative diseases and brain cancer, there are genetics, stem cell pathologies, infectious disease and chronic inflammation. Infectious disease elements include chronic infections from pathogens like T. gondii, and involve transcellular spread of disease mediated by prion-like extracellular vesicles.

2:55 Sponsored Presentation (Opportunity Available)

3:25 Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing

4:00 Enhancing Precision Wellness with Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Analytics

James Hendler, PhD, Tetherless World Chair of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences; Director, RPI-IBM Center for Health Empowerment by Analytics, Learning and Semantics, Institute for Data Exploration and Applications, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Today’s patients, clinicians and researchers have gone from a world of too little data to one of too much. Discovering relevant information, integrating it from multiple sources, deciding what to believe, and exploring alternative treatments are all challenges that go beyond many of today’s medical support systems. We discuss new technologies from artificial intelligence and machine learning that show promise.

4:30 Reverse Translation of Adverse Event Reports Paves the Way for De-Risking Preclinical Off-Targets

Laszlo Urban, MD, PhD, Global Head, Preclinical Secondary Pharmacology, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research

The FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) remains the primary source for post-marketing pharmacovigilance. The system is largely uncurated, and lacks a method for linking drugs to the chemical structures of their active ingredients, increasing noise and artefactual trends. The precautions and methods we describe may enable investigators to avoid confounding chemistry-based associations and reporting biases in FAERS, and illustrate how comparative analysis of ADRs can reveal underlying mechanisms.

5:00 Sponsored Presentation (Opportunity Available)

5:30 Best of Show Awards Reception in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing

7:00 – 10:00 Bio-IT World After Hours @Lawn on D

Thursday, May 17

7:30 am Registration Open and Morning Coffee

8:00 PLENARY KEYNOTE SESSION & AWARDS PROGRAM

9:45 Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall and Poster Competition Winners Announced

SCALING DATA MANAGEMENT FOR DISEASE MONITORING

10:30 Chairperson’s Remarks

10:40 A Cloud-Based Bioinformatics Solution for Infectious Disease Diagnostics

Rita R. Colwell, PhD, DSc, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland Institute of Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland College Park

Currently many pathogens escape detection in samples when traditional assays, such as culture and PCR, are employed. It is critical to develop unbiased, timely methods of pathogen detection. This presentation describes our success utilizing such facile methods for infectious disease research with various pilot studies including necrotizing fasciitis, infective endocarditis, urinary tract infections, and wound infections. Methods of metagenomic identification and antimicrobial resistance profiling will be presented.

11:10 Cloud-Based Asynchronous Virtual Tumor Board (VTB) to Operationalize and Scale the Democratization of Precision Oncology

Subha Madhavan, PhD, Chief Innovation Officer, Perthera, Inc.

Since 95% of cancer patients are treated in the community, the ability to provide a leading-edge, scalable precision medicine workflow is of critical importance. We have developed a scalable, asynchronous Virtual Tumor Board (VTB) that can bring together patients’ clinical and molecular data along with clinical evidence to the fingertips of the clinician for precision treatment planning.

11:40 Sponsored Presentation (Opportunity Available)

11:55 Sponsored Presentation (Opportunity Available)

12:10 pm Session Break

12:20 Luncheon Presentation I to be Announced

12:50 Luncheon Presentation II: Biotech-in-a-Box: Turn-Key Cloud Infrastructure for Enterprise-Grade Research 

Elliot Menschik, MD, PhD, Healthcare and Life Science Ventures, Amazon Web Services

This talk introduces the AWS Biotech Blueprint, a toolset enabling biotechs to rapidly establish enterprise-grade research environments in the cloud, supporting both wet and computational labs. Optimized out-of-the-box for security, resilience and regulatory compliance, it further automates the installation and integration of leading scientific applications under the customer’s direct control. The talks will include illustrations drawn from successful customer deployments.

1:20 Dessert Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing

DATA MINING FOR DISEASE CLASSIFICATION

1:55 Chairperson’s Remarks

John Methot, Director, Health Informatics Architecture, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

2:00 Disease Classification in the Era of Data-Intensive Medicine

Kanix Wang, PhD, Research Professional, Booth School of Business, Institute for Genomics & Systems Biology, University of Chicago

We used insurance claims for over one-third of the U.S. population to create a subset of 128,989 families (481,657 unique individuals). Using these data, we estimated the heritability and familial environmental patterns of 149 diseases. We then computed the environmental and genetic disease classifications for a set of 29 complex diseases after inferring their pairwise genetic and environmental correlations.

2:30 Enviro-Geno-Pheno State Approach and State-Based Biomarkers for Differentiation, Prognosis, Subtypes, and Staging

Lei Xu, PhD, Director, Centre for Cognitive Machines and Computational Health; Zhiyuan Chair Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

In the joint space of geno-measures, pheno-measures, and enviro-measures, one point represents a bio-system behavior and a subset of points that locate adjacently and share a common system status represents a ‘state’. The system is characterized by such states learned from samples. This enviro-geno-pheno state is considered a biomarker, indicating ‘health/normal’ versus ‘risk/abnormal’ together with its associated enviro-geno-pheno condition.

3:00 PANEL DISCUSSION: Can We Improve Breast Cancer Patient Outcomes through Artificial Intelligence?

Maya Said, ScD, President & CEO, Outcomes4me, Inc. (Moderator)

Panelists:
Regina Barzilay, PhD, MacArthur Fellow and Delta Electronics Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Member, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT

Fionnuala (Finn) Doyle, Vice President and Global Head of Policy and Healthcare Systems, Novartis

Kevin Hughes, MD, Co-Director, Avon Breast Evaluation Program, Massachusetts General Hospital; Associate Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School; Medical Director, Bermuda Cancer Genetics Risk Assessment Clinic

Newly diagnosed cancer patients attempting to understand their treatment options face the overwhelming task of filtering an information deluge, much of which is irrelevant, outdated and occasionally inaccurate. Additionally, matching their diagnosis to best-in-class treatments or potential clinical trials, while simultaneously learning to navigate an extremely complex healthcare system is daunting, even for the most highly trained physicians. We will explore various platforms aimed at improving patient outcomes by leveraging technology to help educate, track, and connect patients with personalized resources while simultaneously working to improve the care continuum and the development of new treatments. We will explore the nexus of healthcare networks and their IT systems, clinical decision-making and delivery, R&D, and patients, for whom we all create our innovation solutions. Attendees will be interested to understand how various groups are working to increase value across the entire system by bringing laboratory, clinical and pharmaceutical science, real-world evidence and patient-reported data together with technology and artificial intelligence to solve health challenges. These approaches offer the opportunity to generate deeper insights into how therapies perform in the real world and harness that understanding to improve efficiency, effectiveness, value, and ultimately, patient care.

4:00 Conference Adjourns