This Track will explore data handling and integration activities, including new approaches to collaborative data sharing, cloud computing, social networking, enterprise 2.0, open-source, Wikis, and SOA, as well as semantic web/semantic solutions for knowledge management.

TUESDAY, APRIL 20

2:00 - 6:00 pm Main Conference Registration

4:00 Event Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

Cindy Crowninshield, Conference Director, Cambridge Healthtech Institute
Sponsored by
 4:05 Keynote Introduction: Ronald Ranauro, Chief Executive Officer, GenomeQuest, Inc.

4:15 PLENARY KEYNOTE: Drug Discovery Opportunities and Challenges -- VC, Biotech and Pharma Perspectives Christoph Westphal, M.D., Ph.D., CEO, Sitris Pharmaceuticals; Senior Vice President, Center of Excellence for External Drug Discovery, GlaxoSmithKline

 

5:00 - 7:00 pm Welcome Reception in the Exhibit Hall

***Drop off your business card at the CHI Sales Booth for a chance to win an Apple® - iPod nano®! 2 Winners will be announced at 6:45pm in the Exhibit Hall

 

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 21

7:30 am Registration and Morning Coffee

8:15 Event Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

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

Sponsored by
 Keynote Introduction:  Jamie Wyatt, Vice President and General Manager Health and Life Sciences, Netezza

8:20 PLENARY KEYNOTE: Impact of HIT Stimulus on Novel Sources of Data for Research John Halamka, M.D., M.S., CIO, Harvard Medical School           9:00 Keynote Presentation & 2010 Benjamin Franklin Award  Alex Bateman, Ph.D., Senior Investigator, Pfam Database Project, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

 

Sponsored by
 9:30 Coffee Break, Poster and Exhibit Viewing
***Drop off your business card at the CHI Sales Booth for a chance to win 1 of 2 Prizes! (Nintendo® Wii™ System or Apple® - iPod touch®)

 

COLLABORATION & OPEN SOURCE TOOLS

10:50  Track Chairperson’s Remarks
Richard Resnick, Vice President, Software and Professional Services, GenomeQuest, Inc.

11:00 Test to Best - Evidence for Collaboration and Science Driven IT as Criteria for Personalized Medicine

Michael Berens, Ph.D., Director of the Cancer and Cell Biology Division, Brain Tumor Research Lab, Translational Genomics Research Institute

The Ivy Genomics-Based Medicine (Ivy G.B.M.) Project links nine U.S. research institutions and one web-applications developer, empirically testing whether genomic characteristics in individual brain tumors can inform optimal treatment options for individual patients. Learn how a combination of established platforms, open source applications, and custom software were fused to meet challenges and support the science to be performed.

Sponsored by
 11:30  Affordable and Sustainable Long Term Data Storage: A Case Study from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)
Jacob Farmer, Chief Technology Officer, Cambridge Computer
Data storage is one of the greatest IT expenses in life sciences research. Much of the data stored in a typical research facility sits idle for reference down the road. Files of this nature are often described with the acronym "WORSE" which stands for Write Once, Read Seldom, if Ever.  WORSE files accumulate forever, thus driving up the overall cost of storage while overwhelming traditional backup systems.  The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is a massive repository of genomics and biomedical information that is administered by the Medical Library of the National Institutes of Health.  The NCBI is anticipating storage growth in excess of 10 Petabytes over the next few years.  The NCBI recently selected the StorHouse file system from FileTek to enable long-term affordable file storage. The StorHouse system uses a combination of disk and tape to strike the ideal balance between performance and cost. StorHouse is responsible for primary storage, caching, backups, and replication of files to a disaster recovery site. The entire file collections is presented as a conventional NFS or CIFS file server, enabling easy access by a variety of user types and applications.  This 15 minute presentation will describe the problems associated with long term file storage and the unique solutions offered by FileTek.  

 

Presented by
12:00 pm caBIG® in the Trenches: Deploying an Infrastructure that Enables Collaboration

R. Mark Adams, Ph.D., Booz Allen Hamilton

Vast amounts of data generated by sophisticated research techniques and millions of clinical interactions represent an un-mined opportunity for collaborative research and discovery. Realization of this potential is predicated upon an interoperable IT environment to facilitate data integration and exchange in support of a wide variety of basic and clinical research efforts. This talk will describe how caBIG® (the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid®) infrastructure enables such endeavors and discuss ongoing deployment efforts and lessons learned.

Sponsored by
12:30 Luncheon Presentation: Microsoft BioIT Alliance: An Update

Les Jordan, Director, BioIT Alliance & Chief Technology Strategist, Life Sciences, Microsoft Corporation

This talk will present the latest activities of the BioIT Alliance, a cross-industry group working to further integrate science and technology as a first step toward making personalized medicine a reality.

1:40 Chairperson’s Remarks
Charles Lee, DVM, Ph.D., Associate Director, Diagnostics Development, Novartis Molecular Diagnostics

1:45 How myExperiment Supports Social Curation, Workflow & Protocols

Carol Goble, Ph.D., Professor of Computer Science, University of Manchester; Principal Investigator (PI), myGrid Project

myExperiment is a collaborative environment where scientists can safely publish and share data and analytical pipelines, computational workflows and experiment plans. Workflows, and other scientific objects and collections can be swapped, sorted and searched for. This talk describes why myExperiment is an extraordinary resource for bio-developers developing workflows and protocols, how we have incentivised and protected contributors of content, and how myExperiment can be embedded in a workflow platform.

Genomics Data & Wikis

2:15 Wiki-Based Data Management System for Toxicogenomics

Stephen Edwards, Ph.D., Systems Biologist, National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

We are developing a data management system to enable systems-based toxicology at the U.S. EPA. This is built upon the WikiLIMS™ platform and is capable of housing not just genomics data but also a wide variety of toxicology data and associated experimental design information. This promotes the joint analysis of gene expression and toxicology endpoints enriching for genes associated with the outcomes of interest. A brief discussion of the system and a case study using the system will be discussed. This talk does not reflect EPA policies or EPA endorsement of any products.

Presented by
2:45 Featured Presentation

The BIG Idea: Strategies to Achieve a Rapid-Learning Health System

(Joint Talk with Tracks 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7)

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

Considerable momentum has been building in government, academe and the commercial sector towards implementation of a “rapid-learning health system”. In this approach to biomedicine, research and clinical care are seamlessly linked in a virtuous circle that enables the collection and analysis of information on clinical outcomes of large populations. This talk will outline the requisite components of such a system—including a mega-community called the BIG Health Consortium™ encompassing the various sectors of biomedicine and electronic interoperability that enables the liquidity of information—and will showcase this new model in action.

3:30 Refreshment Break, Poster and Exhibit Viewing
***Drop off your business card at the CHI Sales Booth for a chance to win 1 of 2 Prizes! (Nintendo® Wii™ System or Apple® - iPod touch®)  Winners will be announced at 3:30pm in the Exhibit Hall

 

SEMANTIC WEB &
LINKED DATA TECHNOLOGIES

3:45 Talk Title

Elgar Pichler, Ph.D., Principal Scientist, Discovery Information, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

4:15 Answering Translational Questions in Neuroscience Using Linked Data Techniques

Susie Stephens, Ph.D., Director, Biomedical Informatics, Johnson & Johnson; Co-chair, W3C Semantic Web for Health Care & Life Sciences

Researchers frequently face challenges in being able to answer translational questions of interest because data is held in disparate stores across discovery, development, and clinical practice. Linked Data has the potential to ease access to these data for scientists and managers by making the connections between the data sets explicit in the form of data links. This talk will describe how the Linked Data approach has been used to integrate a number of data sources in the area of neuroscience.

Sponsored by
4:45 Evolution of the Electronic Lab Environment: How End-to-end Information Management Improves Communication and Collaboration to Drive Efficient R&D

John McCarthy, Ph.D., Vice President Product Management Strategy, Symyx Technologies, Inc.
R&D labs often spend too much time and resource collecting, managing and distributing information to scientists. As a result, many organizations are investing in multi-disciplinary electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) that can be used internally across the enterprise or worldwide across business ventures. The latest generation of ELNs serves as a fulcrum supporting the convergence of instruments, software and workflows. This enables scientists and project teams to share methods, samples, analysis and ideas without disrupting the way the lab works today.

Sponsored by
5:00 Now-Generation Data Transport Technology for Life Sciences: Keeping Pace with Innovation

Michelle Munson, President and Co-Founder, 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.

5:15 – 6:15 2010 Best of Show Awards in the Exhibit Hall

6:15 Exhibit Hall Closes

Sponsored by
6:30 – 10:00 2010 Best Practices Awards Reception & Dinner

 

 

 

 

 

THURSDAY, APRIL 22

8:00 am Registration and Morning Coffee

Sponsored by
8:45 Event Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

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

Keynote Introduction:  Eric Blatte, Vice President of Sales, Commercial & Public Sector, Imprivata

8:50 PLENARY KEYNOTE: There is No Magic, There is Only Awesome: Scientific Computing with Amazon Web Services Deepak Singh, Ph.D., Business Development Manager, Amazon Web Services   Presentation delivered via a live, interactive videoconferencing platform.       9:30 KEYNOTE PANEL The Future of Personal Genomics A special plenary panel discussion featuring: James Heywood, Co-founder and Chairman, PatientsLikeMe Dan Vorhaus, J.D., M.A., Attorney, Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson; Editor, Genomics Law Report Dietrich Stephan, Ph.D., President & CEO, Ignite Institute Kári Stefánsson, MD, Dr Med, Executive Chairman and President of Research, deCODE genetics Kevin Davies, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief, Bio-IT World

 

10:30 Coffee Break, Poster Competition, Vendor Theater Presentations and Exhibit Viewing
***Drop off your business card at the CHI Sales Booth for a chance to win 1 of 2 Prizes! (Nintendo® Wii™ System or Apple® - iPod touch®)

 

INFORMATION EXCHANGE,
INTEGRATION & SECURITY

Sponsored by
 10:55 Track Chairperson’s Remarks
Rainer Fuchs, Ph.D., VP IT R&D & Executive Director, Innovation Incubator, Biogen Idec, Inc.

11:00 Annotating Personl Genomes with SNPedia and Promethease

Mike Cariaso, Founder, SNPedia.com

This talk will use SNPedia.com to survey the current state of microarray and full sequencing based personalized genetics. Much of this information is directly accessible to the public for under $500, but can and will be used inform medical decisions. Pharmacogenomics, the use of genetics to predict a person's response to a drug, is an early success story in this field. Identification of rare Mendelian diseases is becoming commonplace while the search for the genetics of common diseases remains a confusing mix of risk scores and environmental variation. In too many cases the interpretation is largely influenced by which company provided test results. SNPedia features such as Genosets (boolean combinations of alleles) and Magnitude (a subjective measure of community interest) enables annotating multiple genotyping platforms, and suggests an approach for larger structural variants.  SNPedia content is semantic web accessible, with RDFs and queryable via a SPARQL interface. A wiki user community helps to verify and improve the annotations. The tools which perform this analysis are user friendly desktop apps freely available for non-commercial use.

11:30 A Pioneer Electronic Patient Imaging Transferring and Archive System in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Judy Huang, Project Leader , Application Service, Basic Research and Biomarker Program, Merck & Co.

i-SCORE (Imaging Solution for Compliance in a Regulated Environment) is a web based software customized jointly by a technology vendor and Merck based on Merck’s clinical imaging experience. This solution provides a lean and effective system for managing images in biomarker and clinical studies. In addition, Merck is the first in the pharmaceutical industry that uses this innovative on-line electronic transfer and management technology. This talk will present out experience learned throughout the entire process and how we applied sigma methodology to resolve issues.

Presented by
12:00 pm Developing and Implementing caBIG® Enterprise Services

George Komatsoulis, Ph.D., Chief Information Officer (acting) and Deputy Director, Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT), NCI/NIH

NCI CBIIT is evolving and expanding the capabilities of its caBIG® (Cancer Bioinformatics Grid®) program and IT infrastructure by launching its first set of four enterprise services. These efforts draw on five years of experience providing software components and an infrastructure to support information exchange and integration as well as guidance from key industry standards organizations. This talk will describe benefits of the caBIG® approach as well as provide a trajectory for the overall service tapestry being developed by NCI CBIIT.

12:30 Luncheon in the Exhibit Hall
***Drop off your business card at the CHI Sales Booth for a chance to win 1 of 2 Prizes! (Nintendo® Wii™ System or Apple® - iPod touch®) Winners will be announced at 1:45pm in the Exhibit Hall

2:00 Exhibit Hall Closes

1:55 Track Chairperson’s Remarks

2:00 Pharma Informatics: Looking Beyond Our Walls
(Joint with Tracks 2 and 3)

Martin D. Leach, Ph.D., Executive Director, MRL IT for Discovery & Preclinical Sciences, Merck & Co.

Matteo di Tommas, Vice President, Research Informatics, Pfizer, Inc.

The pharmaceutical industry is under increasing pressure to increase the output from research pipelines in an environment of increasing regulatory oversight, and need for significant cost-containment. Across pharma R&D IT the trend is to focus on greater business value and partnership and lower cost.   Both Pfizer & Merck are increasingly looking outside our walls to leverage expertise and develop capabilities for R&D scientists.  Our joint presentation will highlight lessons learned and innovative approaches to meeting the challenge of delivering better outcomes at lower costs by changes in governance, sourcing, collaboration and architecture.2:30 Sharing Data while Keeping Control

2:30 Sharing Data while Keeping Control

Werner Ceusters, Professor, Director, Ontology Research Group, NYS Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics & Life Sciences

Even when appropriate data exchange standards for the integration of electronic health records, clinical trial databases and research repositories are available and adequately implemented, legal, economic and cultural issues may still be barriers for useful information exchange. Fear is everywhere: patients are concerned about insurability and employment, pharma companies want to keep a competitive advantage, researchers want to be the first to publish new results, and clinicians fear more malpractice suits. We propose an information architecture for which there is no basis for these fears.

3:00 How Federated Identity Trust Hubs Improve Identity Management in the Global Biopharmaceutical Community

Mollie Shields-Uehling, President and CEO, Headquarters Office, SAFE-BioPharma Association

Industry-wide Federated identity trust hubs are supplanting identity management within individual enterprises. Public key technology-based trust hubs assert participants’ identity across the entire federation, allowing for trusted interoperability between disparate systems, sectors and geographies. This talk will describe the role of identity trust hubs in the biopharmaceutical sector and how the SAFE-BioPharma digital standard is being used for authentication and for digital signing of contracts, regulatory filings and other documents.

3:30 Safeguarding Electronic Lab Notebooks: Using Digital Timestamps to Both “Sign and Seal” Your Content Protects Its Integrity and Defends Its Authenticity

Chaka Benson, BioInformatics Developer, Scientific Computation, Ansaris, Inc.

This talk will explain how to protect data integrity within an electronic lab informatics environment. A digital time-stamping solution integrated into an electronic lab notebook (ELN) can both sign and “seal” scientific intellectual property and can irrefutably provide the exact format that a record existed in at any given point in time, proving its authenticity and ownership. This presentation will profile Ansaris Pharmaceutical’s approach toward protecting its scientific intellectual property.

4:00 Conference Adjourns

Apple® - iPod touch®,  Nano®, Nintendo® Wii™, are  not sponsors or participants in this program.