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. Winners of the Innovative Practices Awards will present their solutions, revealing the keys to their programs' success. This exclusive session provides a unique opportunity to gain insights into why our judges selected these entries as the best of the best.

In November 2023, UK Biobank unveiled incredible new whole genome sequencing data from all its 500,000 participants – and, in a landmark for medical research, it has made the data globally available via a purpose-built, cloud-based platform. After five years and over £200 million of investment, this was the most ambitious genetic sequencing project of its kind ever undertaken. The abundance of genomic data is unparalleled, but its real value comes from being combined with the existing wealth of data UK Biobank has collected from its participants over the past 15 years on their health and lifestyle, and from whole body imaging scans and proteins found in the blood. Securely sharing this amount of complex health data, over 30 petabytes, had not been done before. DNAnexus and UK Biobank built an online research analysis platform allowing approved, global researchers to access the secure data, and also gave them the required tools to analyze the de-identified data. Today, over 30,000 researchers from more than 90 countries are registered to use UK Biobank. 

Regeneron created a high-throughput screening platform that allows our scientists to test multiple conditions simultaneously with a highly sensitive assay technology for antibody characterization. The Automated High-Throughput Flow Cytometry (HTFC) Data Processing Pipeline supports this platform by replacing manual scientist data workflows with a combination of engineering, automation, and self-service. Built on a foundation of existing applications and tools in our IT ecosystem, this pipeline is driven by configuration files created automatically by the scientists themselves through interactive dashboards. As a result, our scientists focus on the biological relevance of experiments while modified data processing scripts and metadata tagging workflows run in the background. The pipeline automates complex data processing steps while also delivering a more pleasant and effective quality control experience. This project allows Regeneron to choose a complex data-rich assay for routine screenings of our antibodies and accelerate lead antibody discovery for Regeneron to find new medicines.

Because proteins are involved in so many of our physiological processes (including tissue repair, virus-fighting, and nutrient transportation), understanding their 3D structures or how they interact with each other is critical in developing new drugs with specific targets. Regeneron computational scientists and engineers partnered to transform how we predict and understand protein folding and protein-protein interactions by leveraging our internal cloud computational platform. Now, our researchers use AI to deliver 3D renderings of protein-protein interactions, in parallel, and at large scale—effectively empowering us to speed up drug discovery.