Cloud Computing

Enable Collaboration and Drive Better, Faster Analytics Using Cloud Infrastructure and Applications

April 16 - 17, 2024 ALL TIMES EST

Adoption and deployment of cloud technologies is no longer an aspiration but a necessary mandate to enable digital transformation. There is simply no other way to store, manage, analyze, and share the massive amounts of data being collected to drive advancements in precision medicine. However, there are countless choices that must be made to determine the best path for your organization. Through case studies and best practices, the Cloud Computing track explores options and provides guidance on how best to determine the right cloud or hybrid infrastructure and applications to advance R&D, enable collaboration and innovation, and support flexibility to stay abreast of technological advances driving precision medicine.

Monday, April 15

Recommended Pre-Conference Workshops and Symposia*8:00 am

On Monday, April 15, 2024, Cambridge Healthtech Institute is pleased to offer eight pre-conference Workshops scheduled across three time slots (8:00–10:00 am, 10:30 am–12:30 pm, and 2:00–4:00 pm) and six Symposia from 8:00 am–4:20 pm. All are designed to be instructional, and interactive and provide in-depth information on a specific topic. They allow for one-on-one interaction and provide a great way to explain more technical aspects that would otherwise not be covered during the main conference tracks that take place Tuesday–Wednesday.

*Separate registration required. See details on the Symposia here and details on the Workshops here.

PLENARY KEYNOTE PROGRAM

4:30 pm

Organizer's Remarks

Cindy Crowninshield, Executive Event Director, Cambridge Healthtech Institute

4:35 pm Plenary Keynote Introduction

Greg Mazzu, Regional Sales Manager, WEKA

4:45 pm PLENARY KEYNOTE PRESENTATION:

Unleashing the Power of Advanced Computing in Biomedical Informatics: A Vision for Transformative Collaboration

Daniel Stanzione, PhD, Executive Director, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)

In the dynamic intersection of life science and computing, our mission at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is to propel biomedical informatics into a new era of discovery and innovation. As computational leaders, we are dedicated to harnessing the potential of high-performance computing (HPC), machine learning (ML), and data analytics to revolutionize medicine. In this visionary pursuit, we prioritize the development of user-friendly interfaces and intuitive platforms. This approach ensures accessibility for executives and leaders in the life sciences industry, promoting seamless interaction with computational tools and fostering an environment where scientific and technological advancements coalesce. This presentation shares our vision for shaping the future of biomedical informatics where innovation, collaboration, and cutting-edge technologies converge to redefine the boundaries of what is possible in the realm of medicine.

Welcome Reception in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing (Sponsorship Opportunity Available)6:00 pm

Close of Day7:15 pm

Tuesday, April 16

Registration and Morning Coffee7:00 am

PLENARY KEYNOTE PROGRAM

8:00 am

Organizer's Remarks

Allison Proffitt, Editorial Director, Bio-IT World and Clinical Research News

8:05 am Plenary Keynote Introduction

Josh Bond, Head of Product Management, Product Management, Revvity Signals

8:15 am PLENARY KEYNOTE PRESENTATION:

Unveiling Tomorrow's Possibilities: Embrace the Power of Digital Twins in Cancer Care and Research

Caroline Chung, MD, MSc, FRCPC, CIP, Vice President, Chief Data Officer, Director of Data Science Development & Implementation, Institute for Data Science in Oncology, MD Anderson Cancer Center

Explore the transformative potential of digital twins in revolutionizing cancer care and research. Gain insights into how digital twins can help deepen biological understanding, accelerate drug discovery, and personalize therapeutic strategies to optimize treatment outcomes for every individual. Amidst the exciting opportunities are the challenges that must be tackled to harness the power of digital twins to advance precision oncology, empower researchers and clinicians with unprecedented insights, and improve patient outcomes.

Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing (Sponsorship Opportunity Available)9:30 am

Organizer's Welcome Remarks10:15 am

SETTING UP AND SCALING AGILE DATA AND ANALYTICS ECOSYSTEMS IN THE CLOUD

10:20 am

Chairperson's Remarks

Asha Mahesh, Senior Director, Data Science Solutions, Privacy & Ethics, Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine

10:25 am

Developing, Testing, and Evaluating Research and Regulatory Grade AI Systems

Asha Mahesh, Senior Director, Data Science Solutions, Privacy & Ethics, Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine

The task of developing, testing, and evaluating research and regulatory-grade AI systems is challenging, especially when it involves multi-modal clinical and scientific data. We will discuss our framework, processes, quality system, and technology stack to overcome these challenges and develop and deploy AI systems at scale.

10:55 am

Question the Cloud: Questions That Cloud Operations Should Answer to Drive Science and Save Money

Valentine Reid, Director of Cloud Operations, Flagship Pioneering

Cloud computing provides vast storage and computing capabilities to life science. However, the teams managing these resources may sometimes feel detached from the actual science. Cloud teams require strategies to help optimize costs, enhance security, and modernize scientific workloads when they lack context. This talk will equip cloud leaders and professionals with tools and techniques for more effective cloud implementation, enabling both scientific innovation and fiscal prudence.

11:25 am

Agile, Flexible, Scalable Cloud Infrastructure Design

Naga Karthik Ghantasala, Director, Cloud Architecture and Strategy, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

This talk is about how Vertex Pharmaceuticals modernized its image segmentation platform using AWS Serverless technologies and explains how it benefited our scientists in their research & development work. We will review how Vertex’s legacy system worked and pain points associated with it, discuss the new cloud-based system using AWS Serverless, benefits gained, and lessons learned.

11:55 am CO-PRESENTATION:The Power of an Open Source-Approach to Data Standardization and Lab Connectivity

Nick Floeck, Head of Automation & Analytics Product Management, Product Management, Benchling

Nari Kang, Product Manager, Lab Automation Framework, Benchling

Every scientific company faces similar challenges when integrating lab instrument data. Scientists are forced to manually transfer data and manage customized data pipelines, preventing use of data at scale, creating IT and automation burdens, and introducing compliance risks. To address chronic data lifecycle challenges, Benchling has taken an open-source, ecosystem-based approach to data standardization and instrument connectivity, applying FAIR practices with our product, Benchling Connect.

12:25 pm CO-PRESENTATION:Overcoming the Scientific and IT Challenges Associated with Scaling Omics Analysis

Simon Valentine, Chief Commercial Officer, Basepair Inc

Domen Jemec, Senior Product Manager, HealthOmics, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Life sciences organizations looking to leverage omics data to accelerate scientific discoveries often find that the need for scientific creativity and experimentation is at odds with IT governance and cost management. Attendees will learn how a combination of AWS HealthOmics and Basepair can help to streamline the storage and analysis of omics data at scale, maximizing collaboration and productivity while simultaneously reducing costs and adhering to internal IT best practices.

Session Break & Transition to Lunch12:55 pm

1:05 pm LUNCHEON PRESENTATION:Happy Data and the Role of the Cloud

Richard Cramer, Chief Strategist, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Informatica

Sudeep Regmi, Head of Enterprise Data Management and Innovation, IT, Takeda

Happy data delivers value to the business and results from infrastructure, data management capabilities, people and processes all working in harmony. Sudeep will describe how he identifies key business and business processes in a complex organization with a federated structure. He will discuss the essential data management capabilities required to deliver happy data, with a focus on both the capabilities and the unique benefits of the cloud.

Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing (Sponsorship Opportunity Available)1:35 pm

LEVERAGING CLOUD FOR FASTER, BETTER DATA MANAGEMENT AND ANALYTICS

2:25 pm

Chairperson's Remarks

Yohann Potier, PhD, Senior Director, Data Platform, Tessera Therapeutics, Inc.

2:30 pm

Data Science in the Cloud: Managing Datasets and Enabling Analysis

Yohann Potier, PhD, Senior Director, Data Platform, Tessera Therapeutics, Inc.

Navigating various data types and multiple compute environments is crucial to modern data science in biotechnology. The session will cover how the cloud plays a pivotal role in enabling scientific research: allowing us to manage diverse datasets, leverage different computational architectures for different needs, as well as crucial tracking and integration demands for our gene writing research.

3:00 pm

Enabling Machine Learning, Data Pipelines, and CryoEM with Scalable Cloud Infrastructure

Bret Martin, Principal Cloud Architect, Generate:Biomedicines

Generate:Biomedicines is pioneering the field of generative biology—using machine learning models to transform the biological drug discovery process from one of trial-and-error to one that is engineerable, predictable, and repeatable. Our cloud computing infrastructure supports our scientific teams by enabling efficient use of computational tools, highly scalable workloads, secure general accessibility, and commercial and internally developed informatics applications.

3:30 pm CO-PRESENTATION:

Scalable and Flexible Digital Health Data Transformer

Bahador Marzban, PhD, Senior Digital Health Data Engineer, Innovative Medicine R&D, Johnson & Johnson

Vasanth Thirugnanam, Associate Director Data Science, Janssen Pharma

Digital health data collected from biosensors are of high volume. Capitalizing on this digital health data and delivering novel digital biomarkers is a computationally expensive task. Traditionally, these data have been processed sequentially, processing one file at a time, creating a bottleneck in feature extraction. To accelerate the processing of these high-volume data, we have developed a cloud solution for processing raw files simultaneously. The proposed solution is a distributed high-resolution sensor data processing engine designed for meaningful feature extraction. This work presents an innovative solution to the time-consuming bottleneck in processing high-volume digital health data, which is essential for advancing research in large-scale biobank studies. The audience will learn the challenges involved in processing high-resolution data and develop an open mind to collaborate with relevant partners.

4:00 pm flexFS: Supercharging Large-Scale Analytics in the Cloud

Gary Planthaber, Chief technology officer, Paradigm4

Object storage has many advantages, but to date it has meant foregoing the ability to work directly with your data. Paradigm4 eliminates this tradeoff with flexFS, an innovative file system that efficiently exposes data in object storage as a fully POSIX-compliant file system. Optimized for life sciences R&D, a single server supports thousands of concurrent global users, delivering answers and business impact faster while saving engineering and cloud costs.

Best of Show Awards Reception in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing (Sponsorship Opportunity Available)4:30 pm

Close of Day5:45 pm

Wednesday, April 17

Registration and Morning Coffee7:30 am

PLENARY KEYNOTE PROGRAM

8:00 am

Organizer's Remarks

Cindy Crowninshield, Executive Event Director, Cambridge Healthtech Institute

8:05 am

Innovative Practices Awards

Joseph Cerro, Independent Consultant

John Conway, Chief Visioneer Officer, 20/15 Visioneers

Chris Dwan, Independent Consultant, Dwan, LLC

Allison Proffitt, Editorial Director, Bio-IT World and Clinical Research News

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 are being applied to advance life sciences research. The 2024 Innovative Practices Awards winners represent excellence in innovation in the areas of informatics, pre-competitive collaboration, clinical and health IT, and genomics. Companies driving the winning entries include AstraZeneca, DNAnexus, Pistoia Alliance, Regeneron, Tempus, and UK Biobank.

8:20 am Plenary Keynote Introduction

Kshitij Kumar, Founder and CEO, Clovertex

8:30 am PLENARY KEYNOTE PRESENTATION:

Lights, Camera, Science: Film and Social Media Influence on Real-World Scientific Progress and Innovation

David Hewlett, Actor/Writer/Director; Creator, The Tech Bandits

Now, more than ever, life sciences are subject to misinterpretation, reduction, and inaccuracies at the hands of social media and Hollywood. And while it might be tempting to ignore the fake science streaming on YouTube and TikTok, there’s a generation of would-be investigators for whom those platforms might be their primary introduction to research and discovery. David Hewlett has had his share of big screen roles representing science—and science fiction—and he believes it’s imperative that the scientific and technology communities take back the narrative, filling gaps between what’s real and what could be real soon! He’s meeting this future generation where they are in schools, on YouTube, and on Twitch, championing real science in all its iterative, messy, exploratory glory, to recruit bright, diverse minds to lead the next generation of real scientists. He’s got our report from the front lines.

Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing (Sponsorship Opportunity Available)9:45 am

Organizer's Remarks10:30 am

UNIQUE BENEFITS OF CLOUD IN BIOPHARMA: CASE STUDIES AND BEST PRACTICES

10:35 am

Chairperson's Remarks

Hareesh Chandrupatla, Head of Data and Analytics Strategy, Anjin Analytics

10:40 am

Scalable Federated Computing: Public Cloud Optional

Vas Vasiliadis, Chief Customer Officer, University of Chicago, Globus

Life sciences research environments are rapidly evolving to incorporate increasingly diverse resources. Using multiple compute and storage environments efficiently requires researchers to invest valuable time becoming familiar with their unique access methods, and integrating them into research pipelines. We will present a platform that unifies access to compute and storage resources, both cloud-hosted and on premises, and demonstrate how a familiar interface provides users with a superior user experience which allows users to focus on their research rather than on technology management. We will describe and demonstrate how a novel implementation of functions-as-a-service enables even those with only rudimentary programming knowledge to easily compute at any scale, from a laptop to a supercomputer.

11:10 am

Cloud Infrastructure Evolution: Overcoming Challenges While Continuously Building for Scale

Grigoriy Sterin, Senior Principal Engineer, Tessera Therapeutics, Inc.

Join us as we delve into the evolutionary journey of cloud infrastructure at Tessera Therapeutics. We explore the early choices that kick-started our cloud journey and how those choices evolved in response to the dynamic requirements. In this talk, we emphasize how we tackled a range of challenges encountered on the path to scalability. We will cover initial infrastructure decisions, strategies for adapting to rapid growth, technology choices, and numerous experiences of overcoming challenges.

11:40 am End-to-End Acceleration for AI & Drug Discovery

Petrina Kamya, PhD, Global Head of AI Platforms, Vice President Insilico Medicine; President, Insilico Medicine Canada, Insilico

David Li, CEO and Co-Founder, Meliora Therapeutics

Dan Spellman, Global AI Cloud Director, Oracle

Paul Brake, PhD, Industry Executive Director for Life Sciences, Oracle

Explore how two leading biotech companies and a top cloud company are fast tracking pharmaceutical R&D. Insilico Medicine will discuss the use of generative AI to cut costs/time in producing life-saving medications. Meliora Therapeutics will detail scaling a multi-modal AI-powered mechanism deconvolution platform to change the oncology drug development lifecycle. Oracle ties it all together to share how their partnership with NVIDIA is helping fuel the drug discovery ecosystem.

12:10 pm

ENDO-CLOUD—Data Platform for Development of Artificial Intelligence Models in Clinical Laryngology

Mikolaj Buchwald, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC)

In cooperation with clinical experts, we developed a system for convenient labeling and performing analysis on videoendoscopy data. Leveraging the advantages of cloud infrastructure, ENDO-CLOUD allows for better coordination and standardization of the work of multiple international research groups. For implementing AI modules and continuous model development, the system utilizes cloud computing capabilities. Our goal is to provide cutting-edge ICT applications for clinical laryngology, both in clinics and operating rooms.

12:40 pm PANEL DISCUSSION:

Leveraging Cloud for Innovation and Collaboration -- Best Practices and Lessons Learned 

PANEL MODERATOR:

Michael A. Freitas, PhD, Professor, Biological Chemistry and Pharmacology, Ohio State University

Leveraging the cloud is necessary to be collaborative, innovative, and competitive. A compelling aspect for organizations of all sizes is its scalability adapting to different situations due to organic growth, acquisitions, or divestitures.  Join this panel to discuss how companies of different sizes can optimize the benefits from the cloud, how the cloud adapts and supports the different stages of a company journey, and specific benefits for life sciences companies.

PANELISTS:

Alla Bushoy, Engineering Lead, Augmented DMTA Platform, AstraZeneca

Asha Mahesh, Senior Director, Data Science Solutions, Privacy & Ethics, Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine

William Oemler, Director, Software Engineering, Informatics & IT, Vesalius Therapeutics

Nick Whalen, Technical Director, Data Engineering, Novartis

Session Break & Transition to Lunch1:10 pm

Luncheon Presentation (Sponsorship Opportunity Available) or Enjoy Lunch on Your Own1:20 pm

Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Last Chance Poster Viewing (Sponsorship Opportunity Available)1:50 pm

TRENDS FROM THE TRENCHES

Chairperson's Remarks (Sponsorship Opportunity Available)2:30 pm

2:35 pm

Trends from the Trenches

Ari E. Berman, PhD, CEO, BioTeam, Inc.

Laura Boykin Okalebo, PhD, Senior Scientific Consultant, BioTeam, Inc.

Since 2010, “Trends from the Trenches” has been one of the most popular annual traditions in the Bio-IT program. The intent of the talk is to deliver a candid (and occasionally blunt) assessment of the best, the most worthwhile, and the most overhyped information technologies (IT) for life sciences. Learn about computing, storage, data transfer, networks, cloud, data science, machine learning, and more that are involved in supporting data-intensive science.

Close of Conference4:05 pm






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