As data generation increases, there is a need for workflows that are reproducible across infrastructures, able to empower scientists and researchers to apply cutting-edge analysis methods. A main challenge is scientific data is not centralized or standardized
and is fragmented – from instrumentation to clinical research to legacy software. The Software Applications & Services track explores how biopharma companies are utilizing software tools to leverage data platforms to advance data strategies.
Themes of case studies that will be presented will focus on data analytics approaches, data methods and standards approaches, transparency, efficiency, security, and cost-effective solutions.
Final Agenda
Tuesday, April 16
7:00 am Workshop Registration Open and Morning Coffee
8:00 – 11:30 Recommended Morning Pre-Conference Workshops*
W1. Data Management for Biologics: Registration and Beyond
12:30 – 4:00 pm Recommended Afternoon Pre-Conference Workshops*
W9. Research Project Management
* Separate registration required.
2:00 – 6:30 Main Conference Registration Open
4:00 PLENARY KEYNOTE SESSION
Amphitheater
5:00 – 7:00 Welcome Reception in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
Wednesday, April 17
7:30 am Registration Open and Morning Coffee
8:00 PLENARY KEYNOTE SESSION
Amphitheater
9:45 Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
10:50 Chairperson’s Remarks
Robert Zeigler, PhD, Director, Customer Solutions, L7 Informatics, Inc.
11:00 Making Clinical Data Available to Researchers at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology with tranSMART and cBioPortal
Patrick Kemmeren, PhD, Principal Investigator, Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology
The Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology (https://www.prinsesmaximacentrum.nl/en)
is the centralized pediatric oncology center for all children with cancer in the Netherlands since 2018. As a new institute, the Princess Máxima Center has had the opportunity to set up their research IT infrastructure right from the start,
with limited legacy software to take into account. By building a Central Subject Registry (CSR), the center’s researchers have full access to pseudonymized data from all relevant hospital data sources in a timely manner. At regular intervals
the data from all hospital data sources are exported, transformed and pseudonymized, to be loaded in both the tranSMART and cBioPortal data warehouses, where the center's researchers can easily create their 'shopping list’ for patients and samples
of interest. The oncology center even extended the Glowing Bear user interface to notify researchers by email when new patients of interest are available, to ensure no time is lost waiting for research data and samples.
11:30 CO-PRESENTATION: Building a Standards-Based Clinical Data Resource for Cancer: Challenges, Goals, and Progress
Eva Lepisto, Data Services Team Lead, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Oncology’s pioneering role in precision medicine has led to routine tumor sequencing; Dana-Farber has clinically sequenced more than 30,000 tumors. However, the incompleteness and inconsistency of clinical data from EHRs and other sources present
significant challenges to building the patient-specific diagnosis, treatment and outcome data that are required to discover correlates to genomic data that inform diagnosis, prognosis, and personalized treatment. At DFCI, we are striving to improve
the quality and coverage of clinical data for translational research and clinical decision support. In this presentation, we will describe the standards-based data model we have created for representing cancer patient phenotypes, along with a
curation software platform we have developed to streamline abstraction of unstructured data into the standard data model and NLP approaches to populating the same model from clinical text.
12:00 pm CO-PRESENTATION: Discngine
presents 3decision, a Collaborative Platform for Structural Knowledge
Management
Eric Le Roux, CEO, Discngine
Peter
Schmidtke, Scientific Project Manager, Discngine
Discngine develops innovative IT solutions for Life Science research. In 2018, It launched 3decision, a web application that combines a fully annotated & searchable protein structure database and a web-based user interface with state of-the-art structural
analytical tools. The user interface is designed to give molecular modelers, medicinal chemists and structural biologists a common ground for structure-based drug discovery.
12:15 CASE STUDY: How a Top Pharmaceutical Company Supports Scientific Discovery with Contextualized Information Retrieval
Michael Iarrobino, Senior Product Manager, Copyright Clearance Center
A pharmaceutical company needed a better way to support scientific discovery and realize the value of its information assets. But, with siloed data, a lack of awareness of available licensed resources, and multiple discovery workflows it was taking researchers
too long to find information and synthesize data to advance research. In this session, learn how the organization tackled these challenges.
12:30 Session Break
12:40
Luncheon Presentation I : Keys to Success in
Preclinical Informatics Development; All About That Data
Graeme Dennis, Commercial
Director, Pre-Clinical Pharma IDBS
In the R&D industry today, beleaguered system implementations are more common than anyone would prefer to admit. Data harmonization tasks, expectation management, and risk mitigation opportunities can pass before their urgency is even fully
appreciated. This 30-minute talk will explore the keys to success for developing a data-centric approach to R&D, which acknowledges the breadth of project workstreams.
1:10 Luncheon Presentation II: Certara Integral: Next
Generation Data Repository
Kevin Trimm, Senior Director, Product Strategy & Services, Software, Certara
A successful drug development program relies on data being centralized in an accessible, understandable, mineable, traceable, and secure location for analysis and interpretation. Provisioning data to scientists in an organized manner with high performance
can be a challenge. Certara Integral is a validated and 21 CFR Part 11 compliant software as a service data and model repository utilizing the CDISC data model and Amazon Web Services Infrastructure, providing an intuitive solution to this problem.
1:40 Session Break
1:50 Chairperson’s Remarks
Susan A. Roberts, Senior Director, Scientific Computing, Vertex Pharmaceuticals
1:55 Turning WGS Genetic Testing into a Dialogue between Physicians and Labs with GenomeDiver
Christian Stolte, Data Visualization Designer, Informatics Research Innovation, New York Genome Center
Developed as part of the NYCKidSeq project, GenomeDiver fosters a dialogue between the clinician and genetic testing lab. The software leverages the physician’s knowledge of their patient by asking them to provide additional information to the
lab, which then forms the basis for reanalysis. It delivers understandable information about mutations in the entire genome, using knowledge about functional variants coming from an increasing number of public sources, in particular the GTEx project.
2:25 Crowdsourcing Network Biology
William Hayes, PhD, CTO, BioDati, Inc.
Through the use of a publicly available application, BioDati Studio, and an open standards-based language, BEL, we provide an application and platform to allow users to take standard, shareable notes as BEL Nanopubs. These Nanopubs are processed
into Edges, which are stored in a database and used to create networks for any biological context, drive insights, and power analytics. BioDati Studio powers network biology by providing the capability to host biological knowledge from a variety
of sources and provide powerful knowledge sharing/collaboration for the life sciences.
2:55 Scientific Information Management (SIM) – Elevating the Health and Science Process to the Next Level
Robert Zeigler, PhD, Director, Customer Solutions, L7 Informatics, Inc.
Precision medicine and new classes of treatments, including gene and cell therapies, require a new category of companion informatics platforms that automate and synchronize complex drug discovery and therapeutic processes. This talk will discuss
how to enable SIM from bench to bedside in life sciences and healthcare organizations with real-world case studies.
3:25 Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing, Meet the Experts: Bio-IT World Editorial Team, and Book Signing with Joseph Kvedar, MD, Author, The Internet of Healthy Things℠ (Book will be available
for purchase onsite)
4:00 beRi Suite of Tools for Managing the R Language
Robert Gilmore, Researcher II, Psychiatry and Human Behavior, University of Mississippi Medical Center
beRi “beri environments for R installations” is an R environment, R installation, and R package management system for the R programming language. beRi is a suite of Python packages composed of the following components: (1) renv, a
virtual environment manager for R; (2) rinse, an R version manager; and (3) rut, an R utility tool for installing packages. These CLIs were originally developed at Hackseq 2018 at which the project won by popular vote.
4:30 Design Ops in Life Science UX
Kirk Brote, Owner & Founder, Kirk Brote Consulting; Former Director, Communications Team, UX Working Group, The Pistoia Alliance
Software end users in life science deserve easy to use, intuitive software that allows them to focus on science and push forward the boundaries of human knowledge. Unfortunately, because the problems they work on are by definition new and the
workflows they follow complex, that is often not the case. Tools and systems that are hard to use and difficult to onboard new users to restrict discovery. More challenging still, every individual scientist that creates their own tools, and
tools for others, brings into the process their own personal bias about how the system should work. Design Ops for life science allows for the creation of pattern libraries, interaction systems, and other common UX elements to ensure those
making tools follow a standard and consistent set of rules, making software much easier to use and opening up discovery. Last year the Pistoia Alliance introduced a UX toolkit specific to Life Science to address the lack of design methodology
in the biopharmaceutical industry. With the introduction of Design Ops for Life Science UX, it is now possible to show concrete steps for how to take those tools and workflows and distribute them across all of your working teams. By adopting
a standardized design practice based in both human cognition and perception as well as human centered design leads to usable, efficient tools for scientists, which can accelerate innovation, a critical goal in the bio-IT space, where stakes
are high and patients are in need.
5:00 Data Integration and Analytics Strategies for Pharma
John McCarthy, Pre Sales Director, Global Life Sciences, Dassault Systemes
Automated lab procedures, sensor technologies and digitalization has increased the amount of available data. Companies need flexible workflows that enable ad hoc analytics, fast indexing/ontology building and a way to manage best practices within
their organization, and need to be able to integrate their own data/data collected from the public domain, and productize the resulting models generated by their teams.
5:30 Best of Show Awards Reception in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
Thursday, April 18
7:30 am Registration Open and Morning Coffee
8:00 PLENARY KEYNOTE SESSION & AWARDS PROGRAM
Amphitheater
9:45 Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall and Poster Competition Winners Announced
10:30 Chairperson’s Remarks
Gurpreet Kanwar, MBA, PMP, Senior Project Manager, NAV CANADA
10:40 CO-PRESENTATION: Implementation of Complex Innovative Designs (CID) at Janssen
Raj Malathker, Manager, Quantitative Sciences IT, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D
Vlad Dragalin, PhD, Vice President & Scientific Fellow, Global Quantitative Sciences, Janssen Pharmaceuticals R&D
Both the 21st Century Cures Act and the PDUFA VI legislations call for wider use and acceptance of complex innovative clinical trial designs with the goal of streamlining drug development and bringing needed new medicines to patients in a more
timely and efficient manner. Importantly, adaptive designs will provide ethical advantages and make clinical trials more attractive for patients, allowing a larger number of participants to receive the most promising treatment regimen in a
shorter timeframe. We are the first PhRMA company to build an in-house platform, aptly named ACTIVE (Adaptive Clinical Trial’s Interactive Virtual Environment), for efficient implementation of such complex innovative designs.
11:10 Effectively Complete Your Projects
Gurpreet Kanwar, MBA, PMP, Senior Project Manager, NAV CANADA
Most organizations say they have too many projects on the go and are not able to manage with backlog still growing. They want to achieve a high throughput of successful projects, however many are unable or unwilling to allocate an appropriate
level of resourcing to approved initiatives. Methodologies to execute projects are not consistent and lacking standard processes. There is a need to manage project delivery expectations, satisfaction of business stakeholders and balance the
demand to help them achieve their strategic goal.
11:40 Increasing the Velocity of Team Data Science
Gregg TeHennepe, Program Manager, Computational Scientist, The Jackson Laboratory
Beena Kadakkuzha, PhD, Research Project Manager, The Jackson Laboratory
Learn how the Jackson Laboratory has leveraged concepts and processes from Agile and Scrum to significantly increase the effectiveness and pace of teams focusing on data science.
12:10 pm Enjoy Lunch on Your Own (Lunch Available for Purchase in the Exhibit Hall)
1:20 Dessert Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
1:55 Chairperson’s Remarks
Chris Dwan, Senior Technologist and Independent Life Sciences Consultant
2:00 PANEL DISCUSSION: High Performance Consultancies
Moderator:
Chris Dwan, Senior Technologist and Independent Life Sciences Consultant
Panelists:
Tanya Cashorali, CEO, Founder, TCB Analytics
Aaron Gardner, Director of Technology, BioTeam, Inc.
Eleanor Howe, PhD, Founder and CEO, Diamond Age Data Science
An organization must learn and understand the value of why, when and how to use a consultancy. Highly trained and skilled professional experts gather to discuss their role in leading and managing projects for organizations to help them achieve
goals. They will discuss a variety of themes including the best kinds of projects to hire a consultancy for, the timeline of when an organization should hire a consultant vs. full time staff, and big challenges on the horizon. The session
will feature short podium presentations, followed by a moderated Q&A panel with attendees. The topic of hiring a consulting company came up in the data science plenary keynote at Bio-IT 2018. We want to spend time at Bio-IT 2019 exploring
this topic in finer detail.
3:20 KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: Trends from the Trenches 2019
Chris Dagdigian, Co-Founder and Senior Director, Infrastructure, BioTeam, Inc.
The “Trends from the Trenches” in its original “state of the state address” returns to Bio-IT! Since 2010, the “Trends from the Trenches” presentation, given by Chris Dagdigian, has been one of the most popular
annual traditions on the Bio-IT Program. The intent of the talk is to deliver a candid (and occasionally blunt) assessment of the best, the worthwhile, and the most overhyped information technologies (IT) for life sciences. The presentation
has helped scientists, leadership, and IT professionals understand the basic topics related to computing, storage, data transfer, networks, and cloud that are involved in supporting data intensive science.
4:00 Conference Adjourns