Final Agenda: 

Track 9 will explore innovative methods, approaches and technologies that pharmaceutical and biotechnology organizations are utilizing for collaborative drug design, knowledge management and translational medicine. New paradigms in drug discovery will also be addressed.

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 Rose, 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

 Collaborative Drug Discovery

Sponsored by
10:50 Chairperson’s Remarks

Yuriy Gankin, Ph.D., Co-Founder, CSO, GGA Software Services

11:00 The Pistoia Alliance: Pre-Competitive Collaborations in Research Informatics

Ramesh Durvasula, Ph.D., Director, Chemistry Informatics, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Board Member, Pistoia Alliance

The Pistoia Alliance has been working hard to establish several standards in areas as diverse as e-notebooks, scientific literature, and sequence services. This presentation will provide an update on the progress of Pistoia, and highlight opportunities for attendees to participate in current and emerging standardization efforts.

11:30 Collaborative Virtual Organization & Infrastructure for Anti-Malarial Drug Design

Barry Hardy, Ph.D., Project Coordinator, Scientists Against Malaria and SYNERGY

The Scientists Against Malaria consortium is a virtual drug discovery organization collaborating on target selection and modeling, protein expression and assay development, computational drug design, and screening. Supported by developments on the EU FP7 funded SYNERGY and OpenTox projects, a combination of interoperable information systems, ontologies and web services were designed and deployed to manage the data, documents, computational and assay results, activity and toxicology predictions, as well as dashboards to track project progress and to support decision making.

Sponsored by
12:00 Data Management and Informatics Platform for Enhancing Research and Development Productivity and Innovation
Robert Brown, Ph.D., Senior Director Life Sciences, Accelrys, Inc.
Dominic John, Product Marketing Director, Accelrys, Inc.
This talk will discuss the use of the Accelrys data management and informatics platform, one of the pillars of its Enterprise R&D architecture, to enhance research and development productivity and innovation for small molecules and biotherapeutics. Managing end-to-end scientific workflows in a unified informatics platform allows research and development organizations to:
• streamline their operations and reduce operating costs
• increase the potential for innovation through timely capture of information, enhanced collaboration and informed decision making


Sponsored by
 12:30 Luncheon Presentation
FastROCS: Revolutionizing Drug Discovery on the GPU
Bob Tolbert, Ph.D., Vice President, Development, OpenEye Scientific Software
Shape has become a standard tool in the drug discovery process finding utility in virtual screening, lead optimization, library design, pose prediction, and active site comparison. Leveraging the power of GPU technology, FastROCS is capable of matching over 2 million conformations per second which means that corporate collections can be searched in seconds instead of hours or days.

1:40 Multi-User/Multi-Touch Real-Time Collaboration Tools for Drug Discovery Scientists
Steve Guise, Global Head Scientific I.S. & Center Head Basel, Pharma Research & Early Development Informatics, Roche
Roche has developed multi-user, real-time collaboration tools using Perceptive Pixel’s innovative multi-touch technology to support decision making within drug discovery project team. The first application allows for the visualization of chemical and biological data in novel ways facilitating real-time decision capture. A second proof-of-concept application enables multiple users to simultaneously visualize and interact with networks of semantically integrated data. Both applications represent a new way of working that can be best described as “Team Computing”.

Translational Informatics and Knowledge Management

2:10 Chairperson’s Remarks

Paul Denny-Gouldson, Ph.D., Vice President, Translational Medicine, Head Global Healthcare Group, IDBS

2:15 The Translational Medicine Ontology: Driving Personalized Medicine by Bridging the Gap from Bedside to Bench

Susie Stephens, Ph.D., Director, In Silico Immunology, Centocor Research & Development

The Translational Medicine Ontology provides terminology that bridges diverse areas of translational medicine from bedside to bench. An overview of the ontology will be provided along with a demonstration of its utility through question answering over a prototype knowledge base composed of sample patient data integrated with linked open data.

Sponsored by
2:45 pm Converting Data Overload into Data Assets: The Enabling Role of High Context Data Management for R&D

Paul Denny-Gouldson, Ph.D., Vice President, Translational Medicine, Head Global Healthcare Group, IDBS

Clinical, ‘omic, CRO and validated data are true capital assets of pharmaceuticals R&D. Agile progression from target to candidate requires the orchestration of diverse scientific disciplines, each generators and consumers of data. Instant access across this entire data landscape is now a must-have capability for speeding innovative products to market.

3:00 Driving a Linked Data Framework with Semantic Wikis

Laurent Alquier, Ph.D., Project Lead, Pharma R&D Informatics, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development

Semantic Wikis have matured to become much more than wikis. Recent advances in Semantic MediaWiki make it an ideal, low cost platform for data integration and authoring of Linked Data. A practical example applied to translational research will be provided.

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

3:45 SEEK and You Will Find …

Bo Yang, Senior Manager, Knowledge Management Program, Global Manufacturing Business Technology, Pfizer, Inc.

A tremendous amount of experimental information and scientific knowledge has been locked or lost in semi-structured and unstructured data silos in today’s pharmaceutical industry. Enterprise search engines do not understand scientific terms and objects embedded in the contents. This presentation will discuss a scientifically aware search implementation at Pfizer leveraging enterprise search platform. The scope of the document indexing process is expanded to cover embedded chemistry objects and terms such as common chemical names, corporate IDs, SMILES, and InChIs from unstructured content repositories.

4:15 PharmaConnect: Connecting Knowledge from the Lab, Literature and Clinic

Bryan Takasaki, Ph.D., IS Informatics Science Director, AstraZeneca

The Knowledge Engineering initiative within AstraZeneca has recently delivered the first version of a platform and interface (PharmaConnect) that integrates internal and external evidence for connections between key concepts such as targets, pathways, compounds, diseases and clinical outcome. This talk will describe the impact of this new platform and lessons learned during its development.

4:45 Accelerating Competitive Velocity through Licensing Innovation

Sanjeev Wadhwa, Partner, WW Director Life Sciences R&D, Life Sciences, CSC

Pharma companies would take numerous bets with greater coverage to determine the landscape of technologies and people, influential innovators, IP sources and capabilities and competitor portfolios. Leveraging Innovation Networks and Connecting the Dots through Semantic Intelligence will help researchers make discoveries across and among information sources which previously had no connectivity. This new “semantic engine” can organize and present information in a visually appealing manner, highlighting connections, and helping scientists rapidly find correlations between previously unavailable data.

5:15 Best of Show Awards in the Exhibit Hall

6:15 Exhibit Hall Closes

Thursday, April 14

8:45 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

 Information Sharing Platform

10:55 Chairperson’s Remarks

Kenneth Buetow, Ph.D., Associate Director for Bioinformatics and Information Technology, National Cancer Institute

11:00 How to Turn a Model-T eLabNotebook into a Sleek Tesla

Martin D. Leach, Ph.D., Executive Director, IT for Discovery & Pre-Clinical Sciences (DPS), Merck & Co.

The prevailing model in large pharmaceutical companies to drive down cost and leverage external innovation is to use COTS software platforms. Without heavy customization, you are at the mercy of the underlying software and database architecture that comes with these products. With increased deployment of our chosen eLabNotebook we hit a performance wall due to the underlying structure of the software. To overcome performance issues we leveraged a third party platform that supercharged the transactional system and transformed this platform into an information sharing environment.

Presented by
11:30 NCI and Novartis Collaboration: Developing a Network to Support Image Data Exchange in Pharma-Driven Clinical Research
Kenneth Buetow, Ph.D., Associate Director for Bioinformatics and Information Technology, National Cancer Institute
Stefan Baumann, Head of Imaging Infrastructure, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Inc.
Novartis has released ImagEDC—an open source tool based on caGrid, the National Cancer Institute’s grid computing platform—a proof-of-concept tool to enable machine-to-machine integration between partners in Clinical Imaging Trials.  This session will discuss program level aspects of this public-private collaboration, as well as efforts to provide other pharmaceutical partners with access to the software through the Pharma Image Exchange Consortium. The process and requirements to migrate the software from a pilot to production system will also be discussed.

Sponsored by
 12:00 pm The Emerging Role of Translational Science in the Development of New Drugs
Daniel Weiner, Ph.D., Senior Vice President and General Manager, Tripos and Pharsight – Certara Companies
Drug development is a process that is heavily and equally dependent on two main areas: vertical domains of individual expertise, and the transfer of knowledge between those domains. However, one of the classic challenges in drug development is the lack of attention paid to sharing data from one domain to another. Translational science strives to overcome this challenge by emphasizing more collaboration between domains. This presentation will outline why translational science is important, the status of its implementation in the industry, and a vision for its future.

12:30 Luncheon in the Exhibit Hall and Poster Viewing

2:00 Exhibit Hall Closes

 New Paradigm in Drug Discovery

1:55 Chairperson’s Remarks

Nathan Walsh, Ph.D., Director, Informatics and IT, Ensemble Therapeutics Corporation

2:00 “Bioactivity Profile” Prediction - From Single to Multiple Targets Using Computational Supporting Methods

Andreas Bender, Ph.D., Lecturer for Molecular Informatics, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge

The prevalent paradigm that drugs should be selective has been changed recently to the ‘selective promiscuity’ approach - that the right combination of targets hit is most promising. In this talk we present proteochemometrics’ methods which consider data from both the ligand and target side to predict bioactivity profiles of compounds across sets of targets. In addition, prospective validations on NNRTI and GPCR datasets will be presented.

2:30 Chemical and Biological Features of Polypharmacology and Promiscuity

Florian Nigsch, Ph.D., Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research

The idiosyncratic use of “polypharmacology” and “promiscuity” incited us to analyze a vast number of compound–protein relations and corresponding target families. A forcefully simplistic model was able to reasonably accurately attribute compounds to either group. Moreover, we analyzed the differences in cellular responses (mRNA levels) to compounds in each group to further delineate the two.

3:00 Identifying Macrocycles as Protein-Protein Inhibitors Using Bioinformatic Analysis of DNA Programmed Chemistry (DPC) Libraries

Nathan Walsh, Ph.D., Director, Informatics and IT, Ensemble Therapeutics Corporation

This talk will focus on the processing and interpretation of the data generated using DPC libraries of synthetic macrocycle drugs, called Ensemblinstm. Ensemblins, with their unique chemical and biological properties, are a new of drugs in the emerging therapeutic space between small molecules and biologics. As a therapeutic discovery company we are interested in disease pathways where the targets are considered undruggable with current small molecules.

3:30 The Resurgence of Covalent Drugs and Their Potential as Novel Targeted Therapies

Russell C. Petter, Ph.D., Vice President, Drug Discovery, Avila Therapeutics, Inc.

Targeted therapies have revolutionized cancer treatment. Despite this, there is significant need for further chemical and computational innovation to improve potency, selectivity and drug resistance profiles for targeted therapies to make them more effective. This talk will review the potential for computationally designed targeted covalent drugs to overcome these limitations to current therapies.

4:00 Conference Adjourns