Track 4 explores data and its application across multiple research initiatives. Topics covered will include data mining/modeling, computational tools, web portals, microarray, and clinical applications such as cancer and required tools to identify clinically actionable variants.

Final Agenda

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TUESDAY, APRIL 9

7:00 am Workshop Registration and Morning Coffee

8:00 Pre-Conference Workshops*

*Separate Registration Required

2:00 - 7:00 pm Main Conference Registration

4:00 Event Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

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

4:05 Keynote Introduction

Kevin Brode, Senior Director, Health & Life Sciences, Americas Hitachi Data Systems

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

Drop off a business card at the CHI Sales booth for a chance to win 1 of 2 iPads® or 1 of 2 Kindle Fires®!*

*Apple® is not a sponsor or participant in this program

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10

7:00 am Registration and Morning Coffee

8:00 Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

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

8:05 Keynote Introduction

Sanjay Joshi, CTO, Life Sciences, EMC Isilon

8:55 Benjamin Franklin Award & Laureate Presentation

9:15 Best Practices Award Program

9:45 Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing

10:50 Chairperson’s Remarks

Michael Liebman, Ph.D., Managing Director, Strategic Medicine, Inc. 

» FEATURED PRESENTATION 

11:00 Tools for Revolutionizing Translational Cancer Medicine

Kevin Hrusovsky, President, Life Sciences & Technology, PerkinElmer, Inc.

While breakthroughs abound in cancer research, there is a profound disconnect in translating these discoveries to clinical medicine. This talk will discuss how combining the “in vitro-to-in vivo-to human” continuum of research tools with a powerful in silico infrastructure has successfully bridged the chasm from lab to clinic, particularly in the field of cancer medicine and personalized health.

Bioinformatics across Multiple Research Initiatives 

11:30 Biological Research through Omic-Data Integration Using the “Programmable Web”

Matt Roth, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine

This talk presents results from a human breast cancer study that utilized “programmable web” technology via Genboree to drive “virtual data integration” by bringing together only relevant “omic” data from multiple physical locations just in time for analysis. The results presented will illustrate how virtual data integration across multiple research initiatives (large and small) can be applied to any disease.

12:00 pm CECARDIS, An International Consortium to Evaluate Comparative Effectiveness in Cardiovascular Disease Risk Assessment: Algorithms, Biomarkers and Diagnostics

Michael Liebman, Ph.D., Managing Director, Strategic Medicine, Inc.

Sabrina Molinaro, Ph.D., Institute for Clinical Physiology, National Research Council, Italy

CECARDIS is an international consortium of hospitals, ministries of health, and government agencies that compare clinical approaches, procedures/devices and guidelines in large populations exhibiting symptoms of coronary artery disease and the impact of biomarkers in diagnosis/treatment. CECARDIS is developing a platform to support ongoing evaluation of new patient records and to compare effectiveness of existing technologies for prevention, diagnosis and treatment of CVD.

12:30 Luncheon Presentation (Sponsorship Opportunity Available) or Lunch on Your Own

1:40 Chairperson’s Remarks

Saras Saraswathi Ph.D., Postdoctoral Research Associate, Battelle Center for Mathematical Medicine, The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital 

1:45 3D Imaging and Informatics Approaches to Diagnose Genetic Conditions

Curtis Deutsch, Ph.D., Director, Psychobiology Program, Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center, University of Massachusetts Medical School

With the support of NIH, we have developed the first quantitative normative database to diagnose craniofacial abnormalities. This new informatics resource, combined with novel methods in 3D surface imaging and 3D morphometry, provides the means of defining features of medical genetic conditions. These techniques permit, for the first time, objective and reliable quantitative diagnosis on a graded continuum.

2:15 Bounded Rationality Approach to Artificial Intelligence and Its Implications for Understanding and Treatment of Autism

Simon Berkovich, Ph.D., Professor, Computer Science, The George Washington University

A “Big Data” computational model for the brain manipulates explicitly with a small portion of data on top of an implicit context of all other data. The resultant bounded rationality scheme of Artificial Intelligence relies on simple operational models enhanced with context-determined selections. This presentation discusses “Big Data” processing ideology that might be useful for understanding the mechanisms of autism.

 2:45 H3 Biomedicine / Tessella Translational Informatics Platform (TIP) 

Stephen Kottmann, Ph.D., Consultant, Tessella, Inc.
Lihua Yu, Ph.D., Director, Bioinformatics, H3 Biomedicine, Inc.

Recent efforts, in both the public and private sectors, to assemble large datasets of cancer cell line pharmacogenomic profiles have proven effective at identifying biomarkers for drug sensitivity and resistance. Here we describe the theory and implementation of an informatics platform developed by H3 Biomedicine and Tessella, which provides flexible aggregation and interrogation of pharmacogenomics data from many sources.

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

Gene Mapping & Expression 

3:45 InSilico DB Genomic Datasets Hub: An Efficient Starting Point for Managing and Analyzing Genomewide Studies in GenePattern, Integrative Genomics Viewer, and R/Bioconductor

David Weiss, Ph.D., CEO, InSilico Genomics

Alain Coletta, Ph.D., Co-Founder and CTO, InSilico Genomics

The InSilico DB platform is a powerful collaborative environment, with advanced capabilities for biocuration, datasets subsetting and combination, and datasets sharing. InSIlico DB solution architecture will be presented along with a live demo of the InSilico DB online platform. Learn how more than 1000 users from top academic and research institutions are using InSilico DB in their daily research.

4:15 Constructing a Comprehensive Map for Molecules Implicated in Obesity and Its Induced Disorders

Kamal Rawal, Ph.D., Faculty, Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology

We have constructed a comprehensive map of all the molecules (genes, proteins, and metabolites) reported to be implicated in obesity. This map paves the way to understanding the pathophysiology of obesity and identify drug targets and off-targets for existing drugs. This talk discusses the integrated approach we used in combining public resources, abstracts, and research articles to construct this map.

4:45 Quality Assurance: An Essential Step for Gene Expression Analysis Using Deep Sequencing

Dan Kearns, Director, Software Development, Maverix Biomics, Inc.
Dave Mandelkern, CEO & Co-Founder, Maverix Biomics, Inc.

With the advancement of deep sequencing technologies, researchers expect to obtain high quality results from their studies. However, this cannot be obtained solely by successful sequencing runs. Multiple data checks and pre-processing must be performed before downstream analysis. In this case study, we will present an automated quality assurance pipeline that helps improve gene expression analysis results.

5:00 DDN LS Appliance - Simple Platform for NGS Analysis, Data Distribution and Collaboration

Jose L. Alvarez, WW Director Life Sciences, DataDirect Networks

With this unique approach the DDN LS appliance can deliver flexible data ingest options, optimized data analysis resources, a policy based data tiering/archive solution and a geo-distributed secure collaboration platform. The appliance delivers 1.46X better performance on popular LS applications like Bowtie when compared to NFS based solutions.

5:15 Best of Show Awards Reception in the Exhibit Hall

6:15 Exhibit Hall Closes

THURSDAY, APRIL 11

7:00 am Breakfast Presentation (Sponsorship Opportunity Available) or Morning Coffee

Gene Mapping & Expression 

8:45 Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

Lee Moffitt, Content Manager, IEEE Life Sciences

8:50 Network Biology and Personalized Medicine in Multiple Sclerosis

Mark Chance, Ph.D., Vice Dean for Research, Proteomics, Case Western Reserve University

Almost nothing is known about biological factors underlying the remarkable disease heterogeneity observed across multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, and there are no accurate biological predictors of disease severity that can be used for guiding clinical treatment options. Learn about the network biology methods we are using to analyze blood cell gene expression and understand good and poor responders to therapy.

9:20 GeneSeer: A Flexible, Easy-to-Use Tool to Aid Drug Discovery by Exploring Evolutionary Relationships between Genes across Genomes

Philip Cheung, Bioinformatics Group Leader, Scientific Computing, Dart Neuroscience

GeneSeer is a publicly available tool that leverages public sequence data, gene metadata information, and other publicly available data to calculate and display orthologous and paralogous gene relationships for all genes from several species, including yeasts, insects, worms, vertebrates, mammals, and primates such as human. This talk describes GeneSeer’s underlying methods and the user-friendly interface.

9:50 Cloud Computing For Smart People

Dave Maples, Senior Vice President, Bright Computing

Smart people are turning to the cloud as a powerful option for pharmaceutical and life sciences computing. This presentation is about how to make the most of cloud computing without becoming IT experts or reallocating research time to manage cloud resources. Two scenarios will be offered: creating cloud-based servers on the fly, and extending on-premise servers into Amazon EC2.

10:20 Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall and Poster Competition Winners Announced

10:45 Plenary Keynote Panel Chairperson’s Remarks

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

10:50 Plenary Keynote Panel Introduction

Yury Rozenman, Head of BT for Life Sciences, BT Global Services

Niven R. Narain, President & CTO, Berg Pharma

12:15 Luncheon in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing

Panel Session: Building the IT Archetecture of the New York Genome Center 

2:00 Closing Featured Panel Session Introduction

Wanmei Ou, Senior Product Strategist, Oracle Health Sciences

2:10 Panel Session: Building the IT Architecture of the New York Genome Center

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

Chris Dwan, Acting Senior Vice President, Information Technology and Research Computing, New York Genome Center

Jim Harding, CTO, Sabey Corporation

Sanjay Joshi, CTO, Life Sciences, EMC Isilon Storage Division

Robert B. Darnell, M.D., Ph.D., President & Scientific Director, New York Genome Center

George Gosselin, CTO, Computer Design & Integration LLC

In 2011, a consortium of 11 major academic and medical organizations in and around New York announced the creation of the New York Genome Center (NYGC). Under the direction of Robert B. Darnell, the NYGC aspires to be a world-class genomics and medical research center, and is currently undergoing construction in the heart of Manhattan. NYGC management has the opportunity to design and create a state-of-the-art IT and data management infrastructure to handle, store and share the output from what will rapidly become one of the world’s foremost genome sequencing facilities. This series of talks will describe the thinking that went into the design, creation and construction of the NYGC’s IT infrastructure and entire data management strategy.

4:00 Conference Adjourns

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