Cloud computing has become the platform that enterprises are turning to for their applications and data. Data-intensive life scientists and biological researchers - early adopters of cloud - realized the practicality and necessity. Thus, adoption has been greater than anyone expected and users continue to expand applications. Through case studies, Track 5 explores the rapid growth and progressive maturation of cloud as well as evolving provider and user experiences.

Tuesday, May 23

7:00 am Workshop Registration and Morning Coffee

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

(W2) An Intro to Blockchain in Life Sciences

(W3) Delivering Custom Mobile App Projects to the Cloud

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

(W12) Leveraging Cloud Technologies to Enable Large-Scale Integration of Human Genome and Clinical Outcomes Data

* Separate registration required.

2:00 – 6:00 Main Conference Registration Open

4:00 PLENARY KEYNOTE SESSION

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

Wednesday, May 24

7:00 am Registration Open and Morning Coffee

8:00 PLENARY KEYNOTE SESSION

9:50 Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing

CASE STUDY CO-PRESENTATIONS: IMPLEMENTING CLOUD

10:50 Chairperson’s Remarks

Ron Bianchini, CEO and President, Avere Systems

11:00 FEATURED PRESENTATION: Moving Our Corporate Data Center to the Cloud in 12 Months – >725 Servers, >250 Million Files and a Lot of Lessons Learned!

Martin Leach, Ph.D., Vice President, R&D IT, Enterprise Data Management & Analytics, Innovation, IT, Alexion Pharmaceuticals

ChoongTeik Ng, Associate Director, SAP Infrastructure, IT, Alexion Pharmaceuticals

During a recent move, we at Alexion challenged ourselves to move our corporate data center, servers, systems, applications and data to a cloud-based architecture. Our global IT team uncovered >725 physical and virtual servers, >350 business applications and >250 million files. With few exceptions we have successfully moved all this to a cloud based-environment. We now detail our approach, playbook, lessons learned, pitfalls and how we engaged our colleagues company-wide.

11:30 Neuroscience in the Cloud

Bridget Behringer, MBA, R&D IT Mergers & Acquisitions Engagement Leader, R&D Information, AstraZeneca

Immanuel Utomo, MSc, Senior Data Scientist, Informatics and Knowledge Utilization, Celgene

Neuroscience was a unique endeavor that adopted disruptive technologies to conduct drug discovery differently. Unlike the traditional model with internal labs, the full drug portfolio was conducted by a small internal team of key opinion leaders that leveraged capabilities, services and expertise of external partners and collaborators. Cloud computing enabled the group to be flexible, cost effective, and productive.

12:00 pm How Cloud has Changed Life Sciences

Jason Stowe, CEO, Cycle Computing

This talk discusses the impact cloud computing -- with its flexibility and scale -- has provided cost-effective and powerful access to life sciences researchers.

12:30 Session Break

12:40 Luncheon Presentation I: R&D Data Driven Organizations: Stop Treating Your Data Like Trash!

John Conway, Global Director, Research & Development, Data Science and Informatics Strategy, LabAnswer

Without a coherent scientific data strategy, organizations fail to guard and cultivate one of their top assets, data. LabAnswer will walkthrough what a scientific data strategy entails, how it can help emulate a true data company and drive innovation/discovery. Additionally, LabAnswer will show how employing a scientific data strategy can be opportunistic and pragmatic as you develop your infrastructure/cloud strategy.

1:10 Luncheon Presentation II: From Humans to Mosquitos: Enabling Genomics Discovery in Microsoft Azure
Geralyn Miller, Director, Microsoft Genomics, Microsoft 
This presentation will explore why genomics workloads are perfect for the cloud and how Microsoft Research is using Azure to accelerate genomics discovery.

1:40 Session Break

DESIGNING FLEXIBILITY WHILE MAINTAINING SECURITY

1:50 Chairperson’s Remarks

Lance Smith, MBA, Associate Director, IT, Celgene

1:55 How BMS Uses cBioPortal for Cancer Genomics Research

Isaac Neuhaus, Ph.D., Director, Computational Genomics, Bristol-Myers Squibb
BMS has started using cBioPortal for visualizing cancer genomics datasets early 2016, supported by The Hyve, an open source bioinformatics company based in The Netherlands. The cBioPortal server runs on Amazon AWS and is tied to the company Active Directory for authentication. Currently loaded datasets are TCGA, CCLE and M2Gen and we will be loading clinical trial data later this year. Concurrently we are running a pilot for cBioPortal with mouse data.

2:25 Enabling Celgene's Innovation while Protecting the Enterprise in the Cloud

Lance Smith, MBA, Associate Director, IT, Celgene

Celgene uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run R&D workloads, enterprise systems, and collaboration environments securely and all controlled from a single pane. Topics covered include network design, HPC and job scheduling, workload isolation, storage, automated security, and environment auditing. We also discuss business use cases, challenges overcome (technical, legal, security, and organizational), and Turbot guardrails for management.

2:55 Automated High-Scale Computational Infrastructure

Jharrod LaFon, Chief Cloud Engineer, OpenEye Scientific

Large-scale computation is an important aspect of drug design, and increasingly is cloud-based. The true value of the cloud comes not just from computation but by enabling company-wide collaboration; the ability to build, modify, share, manage versions, and evaluate methods. OpenEye’s cloud-native platform, Orion, and its workflow engine, Floe, provide the tools to create innovative approaches for computation and collaboration.

3:10 Research Informatics: Get Ready for the Cloud!

Ton van Daelen, ScienceCloud, Product Director, Dassault Systemes, BIOVIA

The life sciences industry is looking to the cloud to support outsourcing and external collaboration initiatives. At the same time the cloud can give research IT the ‘agility’ to innovate more rapidly and significantly reduce their IT footprint. BIOVIA is helping research organizations implement ‘hybrid cloud’ solutions with its ScienceCloud platform to facilitate this critical transition.

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

4:00 5 Steps to Vet and Manage Cloud Service Providers

Dianne Pacheco, CISM, Information Security Officer, Information Technology, The Jackson Laboratory

The use of cloud services is essential, but for transmitting, processing or storing data that way, buyer beware – not all service providers are created equal. Many consumers do not realize they bear full responsibility for the security of the data held by service providers. This talk walks the audience through vetting and managing their service providers to minimize risk of exposing legally protected or sensitive research data.

4:30 Cloud Enabling Networks for Pediatric Care

Marcia M. Nizzari, MS, Consulting CTO and Software Architect, Ksandr Software Consulting

Cloud infrastructure enables new networks of pediatric hospitals, labs, clinicians, researchers, and pharma that can improve a child's care. The economies of scale, ease of data movement, shared tools, and communication enrichment are significant game changers in the world of pediatric rare disease. We cover how cloud technology and related new software architecture constructs, such as microservices and containers, can drive advancement in precision medicine and facilitate a better future for our patients.

5:00 Aspera as a Data Aggregation and Distribution Hub for Global Tuberculosis Research Protocols

Christopher Whalen, International Program Manager ,Research Data & Communications, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Office of CyberInfrastructure and Computational Biology , National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) 

Jay Migliaccio, Director, Cloud Products and Solutions, Aspera, an IBM Company

Michael Duvenhage, Global Clinical Data Support, Operations Manager, Research Data and Communications Technology, Office of CyberInfrastructure and Computational Biology National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH

Clinical studies are leveraging new medical and informatics technologies. As a large multi-country study, the clinical data management program of the Tuberculosis Research Section of the NIAID requires robust methods to integrate many different data flows with advanced controls. This talk will focus on the technical issues that emanate from the study's ambitious goals and stringent security requirements and how the Aspera high speed transport software is used to solve these global data transfer challenges.

5:30 – 6:30 15th Anniversary Celebration in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing and Best of Show Awards

Thursday, May 25

7:00 am Registration Open and Morning Coffee

8:00 PLENARY KEYNOTE SESSION & AWARDS PROGRAM

8:05 Benjamin Franklin Awards and Laureate Presentation

8:35 Best Practices Awards Program

8:50 Plenary Keynote

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

APPLYING CLOUD FOR LARGE-SCALE GENOMIC RESEARCH

10:30 Chairperson’s Remarks

Pamela Duffy, MS, Director, Core Clinical Solutions, IT, Pfizer

10:40 FEATURED PRESENTATION: To the Cloud(s): Keeping Up with DNA Sequencing

Stacey Gabriel, Ph.D., Director of the Genomics Platform, The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

To keep up with sequencing at population scale, we require scalable, efficient, and cost-effective analysis approaches to eliminate computation as the gating factor in the progress of scientific discovery. We discuss challenges and findings from our experience, and an approach to empower other researchers to leverage our cloud-based best practice analysis pipelines capable of processing a whole genome every 4 minutes.

11:10 Multicloud in Action: A System for Variant Detection and Annotation Workflow in Multiple Clouds

Mohamed Abouelhoda, Ph.D., Head, Bioinformatics, Saudi Human Genome Project, Genetics Department, King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre (KFSHRC)

Exploiting competition in the cloud computing market is an effective means for reducing the cost of genomic data analysis. We present MC-GenomeKey, a novel package for running the variant analysis workflow in multiple cloud platforms, including Amazon, Google, and Azure. MC-GenomeKey can run the jobs in different clouds and it provides a reliable use of the spot instances of Amazon in combination with Google cloud for further cost reduction.

11:40 Re-Thinking the Cloud for Data-Intensive Science: The Lab7/IBM Genomic Cloud

Christopher Mueller, Ph.D., President & CTO, Lab7 Systems

The Lab7/IBM Genomic Cloud presents a new approach to scientific cloud computing. By necessity, traditional cloud services cater to a wide range of use cases, limiting their utility for cost-effective high-performance computing. Understanding the needs of high-throughput genomic cores and limitations of commodity clouds, we designed a cloud service with a complete hardware, software, and support stack optimized for genomics.

11:55 Innovations in Large Scale Life Sciences Research

Karan Bhatia, Ph.D., Cloud Specialist, Google Cloud

Google Cloud enables scientists to change the way the perform research and collaborate with one another. This presentation will highlight how Google Cloud is accelerating life sciences research and finding new ways to innovate.

12:10 pm Session Break

12:20 Luncheon Presentation I: Freeing Data: How to Win the War with Hybrid Clouds

Ron Bianchini, CEO and President, Avere Systems

Adam Kraut, Director of Infrastructure and Cloud Architecture, BioTeam, Inc.

The public cloud is a necessary point of convergence for big science. Sustainable cloud infrastructures continue to leverage breakthroughs for life sciences. This presentation will focus on the factors leading to successful missions in public and hybrid cloud. Discuss the dichotomy of hybrid clouds and examples of real-world hybrid cloud use cases. Participants will gain valuable insights into how to free datasets to enable research and scientific progress with minimal infrastructure friction.

 
 12:50 Luncheon Presentation II: Innovative Practices in the Cloud

Joseph J. Corkery, M.D., Senior Product Manager, Google Cloud

Bill Mayo, Chief Information Officer, Broad Institute

Join Google Cloud and Bill Mayo from the Broad Institute to discuss how Google Cloud provides an opportunity to innovate traditional biomedical & research IT practices. In this session we will discuss how companies are managing workloads in the cloud, using big data to analyze large amounts of information, and leveraging machine learning to drive improvements from research methodologies to clinical practices.

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

FEATURED SESSION: BIOTEAM MICRO-SYMPOSIUM: 2017 BIO-IT TRENDS

1:55 Chairperson’s Remarks

Chris Dwan, Senior Technologist and Independent Consultant

2:00 BioTeam Micro-Symposium: 2017 Bio-IT Trends

Chris Dwan, Senior Technologist and Independent Consultant (Moderator)

Ari E. Berman, Ph.D., Vice President and General Manager of Consulting Services, BioTeam, Inc.

Chris Dagdigian, Founding Partner & Director, Technology, BioTeam, Inc.

Aaron Gardner, Senior Scientific Consultant, BioTeam, Inc.

Adam Kraut, Director of Infrastructure and Cloud Architecture, BioTeam, Inc.

Asya Shklyar, Senior Scientific Consultant, Infrastructure, BioTeam, Inc.

Since 2010, the “Trends in 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 was 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 tried to recap the prior year by discussing what has changed (or not) around infrastructure, storage, computing, and networks. This presentation has helped scientists, leadership, and IT professionals understand the basic topics involved in supporting data intensive science. For 2017, the “Trends in the Trenches” presentation will evolve and expand from 60-minutes to 120-minutes and feature more content, speakers, and interactive discussion. Short focused podium talks on current trends related to computing, storage/data transfer, networks, and cloud will be presented. A Q&A moderated discussion follows. Come prepared with your questions and commentary for this informative and lively session.

4:00 Conference Adjourns