Data security is defined by the processes and mechanisms in place that prevent data misuse and identify threat risks. However, many biological research data sources, from IP to genomic to mobile, require different levels of security. The reality is that it matters not where your data exists, but the ways in which data is accessed. Track 13 addresses security services from private to cloud-based systems for academic, government, clinical, and pharmaceutical networks.

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*

(W15) Virtual Pharma: Evolving toward True Data Exchange Highways beyond Corporate Firewalls

* 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

NETWORKING & DATA SECURITY

10:50 Chairperson’s Remarks

Tom Johnson, Senior Director, Healthcare and Life Sciences Solutions, Exostar

11:00 Science DMZ and Security around Moving Data between Sites

Eli Dart, Network Engineer on Science DMZ, ESNET

11:30 End-To-End Asymmetric Encryption of Biomedical Data In-Transit and At-Rest

Ryan Harrison, Ph.D., Head of Engineering, BioBright

We present a workflow for the end-to-end asymmetric encryption of biomedical data, that goes well beyond the typical (not encrypted at all) and conscientious (HTTPS/SSL in-transit, AES-256 at-rest) laboratory use-cases. The pipeline, which is commercially available to selected customers, allows the option of customizable metadata extraction, allowing efficient lab-workflow-related search to coexist with at-rest encryption.

12:00 Networking and Data Transfer in the Modern Life Sciences and Healthcare Era

Ari E. Berman, Ph.D., Vice President and General Manager of Consulting Services, BioTeam, Inc.
Data generation throughout the life sciences research and healthcare domains has risen at a rate far beyond that predicted by Moore's Law. As a result, organizations are accumulating 10's to 100's of petabytes (PB) of data, spending millions on storage systems, and doing it all in a manner consistent with out of date IT practices and policies. These practices include little to no data management, ineffective or non-existent data lifecycle policies, no metadata standards, and a dependence on network infrastructure and services that are unrealistic and unsustainable. In this presentation, we will discuss the general scope of the data generation landscape in Life Sciences as well as review generalized networking and security solutions that have successfully supported research missions throughout the industry and enable the of movement and sharing large amounts of data effectively and sustainably. 

12:30 Session Break

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

1:40 Session Break

DESIGNING CLOUD 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

STRATEGIES FOR MAINTAINING DATA PRIVACY

10:30 Chairperson’s Remarks

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

10:40 FEATURED PRESENTATION: Beyond the Firewall: Protecting Information Holistically with Advanced Data Analytics

Alexander D. Kent, Ph.D., Senior Executive Adviser, Cybersecurity, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Unfortunately, much of contemporary cybersecurity focuses on detection and mitigation of cyber threats at the perimeter of enterprise networks; the candy metaphor of “a hard shell with a soft, chewy center” applies well to modern cybersecurity. Today's cyber threats include traditional insider information theft as well as sophisticated external cyber actors where traditional protections have little value. Instead, modern defensive approaches must focus on understanding how information should and should not be used within the cyber environment through the use of advanced data analytics.

11:10 Creating & Leveraging an Industry Security Standard to Protect IP & Sensitive Data throughout the R&D Process

Matt King, Vice President, Global Policy, SAFE-BioPharma Association

Tom Johnson, Senior Director, Healthcare and Life Sciences Solutions, Exostar

The drug R&D process, and clinical trials in particular, bring together a wide range of public and private organizations. Participants of all sizes and IT maturities require access to intellectual property and sensitive data at various points in the process. These collaborative requirements create vulnerabilities that put information at risk, yet to date, there are no standards for interoperable authentication credentials or identity management systems. In this presentation, the SAFE-BioPharma Association and Exostar will discuss the need for standards, the latest in SAFE-BioPharma standards development, and how solutions that leverage these emerging standards are being used today to issue, validate, and recognize industry-trusted certified credentials across the ecosystem. The standards, and credential providers that leverage them, provide secure access to the applications and data individuals need to collaborate seamlessly and productively.

11:40 From the Board Room Down: What Healthcare Executives and Managers Need to Know about Cyber-Security

James Slaughter, Principal, Wolf Den Associates

No healthcare organization can be completely immune from cyber-attacks and adversaries. The risk of cyber-attack is no longer limited to the IT department; it is a key business issue that must be addressed by the C-suite. In this we talk we explore the measures that can be taken to mitigate risks and integrate cyber-security into the business culture.

12:10 pm Session Break

12:20 Luncheon Presentation (Sponsorship Opportunity Available) or Enjoy Lunch on Your Own

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

GENOMIC DATABASE MINING, MANAGEMENT, AND PRIVACY

1:55 Chairperson’s Remarks

Liz Worthey, Ph.D., Faculty Investigator & Director, Software Development and Informatics, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology

2:00 Community-Driven Approaches to Gene Curation

Marina DiStefano, Ph.D., Variant Scientist, Laboratory for Molecular Medicine, Partners HealthCare

As precision medicine expands and whole exome sequencing becomes standard, it is critical to define a common framework to assess the evidence for gene-disease associations. Testing this framework involves reaching out to the experts in various specialties for validation. With input from the genetic community, genes can be transparently and systematically evaluated and prioritized for analysis in various clinical contexts.

2:30 FEATURED PRESENTATION: A Comprehensive Approach to Rare Disease Interpretation: Moving beyond Identification of a Causal Variant

Liz Worthey, Ph.D., Faculty Investigator & Director, Software Development and Informatics, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology

We discuss application of methods for analyzing, storing, and interpreting variant data that allows us to move beyond MDx-related to a single variant to support a refined understanding of human health and disease. The discussion includes methods to: 1) support increased definitive diagnosis rates, 2) explore genotype to phenotype associations that can be used to predict disease course in a particular individual, and 3) identify modifiers that alter clinical presentation.

3:00 A Curated Database of 150,000 Variants from Clinical Whole-Genome Sequencing: What Does It Take to Maintain and Donate to ClinVar?

Aditi Chawla, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Clinical Services Laboratory, Illumina

We present the workflow for variant classification, including an autoscore system that calculates a variant’s potential to have caused the associated disease, search for literature on variants, and manual clinical curation based on ACMG guidelines. We discuss strategies for maintaining and updating variant classifications over time, laboratory policy for updating clinical reports as variant classification changes, process for donating to ClinVar, and summary of our ClinVar donation.

3:30 Conference Adjourns