Final Agenda: 

Track 2 explores data handling and integration activities. Themes covered include technologies and applications for managing/sharing/publishing/preserving data, software tools, open source solutions, collaborative web technologies, and advances & trends.

TUESDAY, APRIL 12

7:00 am Workshop Registration and Morning Coffee

8:00 - 4:00 pm Pre-Conference Workshops*

*Separate Registration Required.

2:00 - 6:00 Main Conference Registration

4:00 Event Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

Cindy Crowninshield, RD, LDN, Conference Director, Cambridge Healthtech Institute

Sponsored by
4:05 Keynote Introduction
Chris Blessington, Life Sciences Solutions Architect, Isilon

Plenary Keynote
4:15 Making the World’s Knowledge Computable

Stephen Wolfram, Ph.D., CEO, Wolfram Research; Creator of Wolfram|Alpha

Sponsored by
5:00 Welcome Reception in the Exhibit Hall and Poster Viewing

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13

7:00 am Registration and Morning Coffee

8:00 Event Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

Phillips Kuhl, Co-Founder and President, Cambridge Healthtech Institute

Sponsored by
 8:05 Keynote Introduction
Grant Stephen, CEO, Tessella, Inc.

Plenary Keynote
8:15 Interacting with Complex Information Landscapes: Integration and Next Generation User Interfaces

Bryn Roberts, Ph.D., Global Head, Informatics, Pharma Research and Early Development, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.

8:45 Benjamin Franklin Award/Presentation: Jonathan Eisen, Ph.D., Professor, Genome Center, University of California, Davis

9:10 Best Practices Awards Program

Sponsored by
9:45 Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall and Poster Viewing

Technologies and Applications for
Managing, Sharing, Publishing,
and Preserving Data

10:50 Chairperson’s Remarks
Brian Bissett, M.B.A., MSEE, Staff Analyst, Office of the CIO, Social Security Administration

11:00 Featured Presentation
HPC Trends from the Trenches (Joint with Tracks 1 - 3)

Chris Dagdigian, Founding Partner and Director of Technology, BioTeam, Inc.

This talk will review some of the BioTeam’s recent work with biotech, pharmaceutical, government and enterprise clients. As an independent consulting firm, the BioTeam is able to see how HPC problems in life science informatics have been approached by organizations of varying type and size. We will address common problems and observed trends in computing, workflows and data movement, along with details on particularly clever solutions observed in production environments around the world.

Sponsored by
11:30 Increasing Translational Research Bandwidth: The Value of Integrative Informatics Platforms

Philip Payne, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Chair, Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University

This session will describe how caBIG®-interoperable infrastructure may be deployed to simplify data management and information exchange, thereby supporting collaborative research in cancer and other diseases. Approaches to link robust middleware developed by the NCI with clinical and translational research use cases at the local, community, and national levels will be discussed.

Sponsored by
12:00 pm Ultra High-Speed Transport of Life Sciences Data over Global Networks

Diego Dugatkin, Ph.D., Vice President, Product Management, Aspera, Inc.

Collaborative research teams need to efficiently exchange, process and analyze gigabytes of data in a sequence run. Traditional data transport methods are unable to manage this volume of data. This session focuses on now-generation transport technologies used in genomic research that achieves up to 1000x the throughput of standard file transfer protocols. A case study of global researchers participating in the 1000 Genomes Project showcases how they have been able to exchange sequencing data at 1 Gbps.

Sponsored by
12:30 Luncheon Presentation
The Role of Standards in Discovery
Les Jordan, Industry Technology Strategist, Life Sciences, Microsoft Corporation
Drug discovery has traditionally had a lack of integration and interoperability between systems.  Now there are a couple emerging standards and companies that are starting to focus on integration and interop.   This session will discuss those standards, architectures for their implementation and a vision for the future of interoperability that crosses all sectors of Health.

1:40 Chairperson’s Remarks
Giles Day, Managing Director, Distributed Bio, LLC

1:45 A Unifying Platform for Integrative Informatics

Victor Lobanov, Director, Informatics & Pharmaceutical R&D, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical
With more than 2,000 users around the world, the ABCD informatics platform has now been firmly established as an indispensible tool for pharmaceutical research at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development. This talk will provide an overview of the current capabilities of the platform and a perspective on its future direction.

2:15 Agile BI & Agile Data Services: A Perfect Fit

Murtaza Cherawala, Senior Information Technology Architect, Enterprise Applications Group, Biogen Idec

To improve business processes for customer interactions, financial performance management, operational BI, and strategic intelligence, an agile BI is needed. This includes a data service infrastructure that leverages virtualization, data integration, data quality and other existing tools that deliver reusable information-as-a-service across disparate, historical and real-time, internal and external “big data” with increased flexibility. This case study presentation will demonstrate the use of data virtualization and data warehouse as an extension to increase project completion time and reduce costs.

Sponsored by
2:45 Enabling Informatics and Enterprise Search in Drug Discovery

Andreas Matern, Vice President, Technical Sales, Thomson Reuters

As technological advances change how users interact with web based data, researchers in pharma R&D are eager to adopt technologies which allow them to search and perform analysis on proprietary and public data sets in easy to use systems. The development of APIs (application programming interfaces) to web based databases enables the construction of novel user interfaces through a variety of end user applications. This talk will focus on accessing public and proprietary data with an emphasis on a competitive intelligence work stream.

3:15 Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall and Poster Viewing

3:45 Data Warehouses for Pharma Development: A Stepwise and Lean Approach

Norbert Fritz, Ph.D., Development Leader, Product Development - Information Management, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.

Data integration, the core element of any Data Warehouse, can be accomplished to different degrees: technical, structural and semantic. Whereas it is generally desirable to achieve the highest level of data integration (semantic), this might not always be feasible due to many factors including constraints of data sources, limited data quality, and budgets. This presentation will describe a stepwise approach for different levels of data integration in the context of clinical data and analyze its impact on data processing and usage.

4:15 Deployment of iRODs for Large Scale Genomics Archive

Chris Smith, Co-founder and Technical Director, Distributed Bio, LLC

This presentation will describe how we implemented an iRODs virtual file system to replace an existing file based archive system.

Sponsored by
 4:45 Surfing the Rich Data Deluge
Steps Toward Developing an Effective IT Strategy
John Whittle, Vice President, Tessella, Inc.
Today’s pharmaceutical and biotech companies are drowning under a tsunami of digital images and other types of rich data. From NextGen DNA sequencing to high content screening to whole animal imaging, these complex and rapidly evolving technologies open new avenues of scientific exploration across drug discovery and development. But these advances present IT organizations with the challenge of managing large, diverse data sets generated by research scientists who are frequently geographically dispersed. There is no “one size fits all” approach IT organizations can follow to overcome these challenges. This talk examines these IT challenges and presents practical approaches to developing an IT strategy tailored to your organization’s needs.


5:15 Best of Show Awards in the Exhibit Hall

6:15 Exhibit Hall Closes

THURSDAY, APRIL 14

8:45 am Event Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

Kevin Davies, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief, Bio-IT World

10:30 Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Competition

Software Tools, Open Source
Solutions, and Collaborative
Web Technologies

10:55 Chairperson’s Remarks

Brian Bissett, M.B.A., M.S.E.E., Staff Analyst, Office of the CIO, Social Security Administration

11:00 Data Analytics of Strategic Information Technology Asset Reviews

Brian Bissett, M.B.A., M.S.E.E., Staff Analyst, Office of the CIO, Social Security Administration

The Social Security Administration (SSA) has recently been tasked with legislative mandates to take on more Health Care IT programs. To ensure a uniform process is utilized in selecting the best health care efforts for the agency to start or continue funding, the SSA created the Strategic IT Asset Review (SITAR) process to evaluate the programmatic costs and benefits of proposed IT programs. A case study will be presented of software tools and collaborative web technologies that show how data collected, integrated, and automated from data analysis of healthcare proposals can determine initiatives costs, benefits, and Return on Investment (ROI).

11:30 Integrated Decision Support for Drug Safety Assessment

Ola Spjuth, Ph.D., Researcher, Pharmaceutical Biosciences, Uppsala University; Project Leader, Bioclipse

Lars Carlsson, Ph.D., Global Safety Assessment, AstraZeneca R&D, Mölndal, Sweden

The Bioclipse Decision Support system is a free and open source solution developed as a collaboration between the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences at Uppsala University, Sweden, and the Computational Toxicology group at AstraZeneca R&D, Mölndal, Sweden. This talk presents a general framework for building and deploying predictive in silico models, demonstrated on drug safety data. The result is a decision support system capable of running local and remote models with interpretable results.

12:00 pm Sponsored Presentation
Speaker to be Announced

 12:30 Luncheon in the Exhibit Hall and Poster Viewing

2:00 Exhibit Hall Closes

Advances and Trends

1:55 Chairperson’s Remarks

2:00 Investing in Translational Medicine: Analysis of the Impact of Information Systems

Jonathan Usuka, Ph.D., M.B.A., Director, Global Business Partnering, Celgene Corporation

This presentation explores the cost/benefit analysis of pharmaceutical industry spending in translational therapies, survey of novel vendor solutions that have impacted translational approaches, and success scenarios for bringing diagnostic information into therapy development.

2:30 Semantic Computing and Biomedicine

Phillip Sheu, Ph.D., Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Irvine

Semantic computing is in line with Web 3.0, the next generation of Web that is characterized by semantic Web and the Internet of ‘things,’ and may be even broader as it also includes computing driven by natural language and all computational content such as software, devices, and processes. This presentation addresses the applications of Semantic Computing in biomedicine.

3:00 Cyber Infrastructures for Synthetic Genomics: The Emergence of Genetic Design Automation

Jean Peccoud, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Bioinformatics, Virginia Tech

Chemically synthesizing DNA molecules the size of bacterial genomes should now lead to the development of a new generation of software infrastructures to automate the design, fabrication, and characterization of synthetic DNA molecules. A challenge is how specialists who work in different branches of the organization can contribute to the project without needing to know the entire project plan. Learn the support needed to develop a synthetic biology project of this kind including open source applications and how to engage different stakeholders in an organization.

3:30 The Atlas Cloud Computing Infrastructure for Organizing and Querying Multiomics Data (Joint with Tracks 1-5)

Misha Kapushesky, Ph.D., Functional Genomics Team Leader, EBI, Cambridge UK

The Expression Atlas is a cloud computing based distributed infrastructure for organizing and querying multiomics data. Built upon the open-source Expression Atlas project at the EBI in partnership with the pharmaceutical industry, the Atlas provides a scalable solution that can be easily deployed on in-house servers or accessed remotely in the cloud. Learn how the Atlas deals with secure processing and combined analysis and integration of public/private transcriptomic and proteomic data, with an emphasis on our novel pipeline for next-generation sequencing data processing and reporting.

4:00 Conference Adjourns