Cloud Computing

Enable Collaboration and Drive Better, Faster Analytics Using Cloud Infrastructure and Applications

May 17 - 18, 2023 ALL TIMES EDT

Adoption and deployment of cloud technologies is no longer an aspiration but a necessary mandate to enable digital transformation. There is simply no other way to store, manage, analyze, and share the massive amounts of data being collected to drive advancements in precision medicine. However, there are countless choices that must be made to determine the best path for your organization. Through case studies and best practices, the Cloud Computing track explores options and provides guidance on how best to determine the right cloud or hybrid infrastructure and applications to advance R&D, enable collaboration and innovation, and support flexibility to stay abreast of technological advances driving precision medicine.

Monday, May 15

– 6:00 pm Hackathon*8:00 am

*Separate Complimentary Registration Required, see Hackathon page to submit your project OR register to participate

– 5:00 PM Registration Open – Come Early and Avoid the Lines2:00 pm

Tuesday, May 16

Registration Open7:00 am

Recommended Pre-Conference Workshops and Symposia*8:00 am

On Tuesday, May 16, 2023 Cambridge Healthtech Institute is pleased to offer nine pre-conference workshops scheduled across three time slots (8:00-10:00 am, 10:30 am-12:30 pm, and 1:45-3:45 pm) and two Symposia from 8:25 am-3:45 pm. All are designed to be instructional, interactive and provide in-depth information on a specific topic. They allow for one-on-one interaction and provide a great way to explain more technical aspects that would otherwise not be covered during the main conference tracks that take place Wednesday-Thursday.

*Separate registration required. For details, see Workshop agendas, FAIR Data Symposium agenda, and Knowledge Graphs Symposium agenda.

– 3:45 pm Hackathon*8:00 am

*Separate Complimentary Registration Required, see Hackathon page to submit your project OR register to participate

Refreshment Break and Transition to Plenary Keynote3:45 pm

PLENARY KEYNOTE PROGRAM

4:00 pm

Plenary Keynote Organizer's Remarks

Cindy Crowninshield, Executive Event Director, Cambridge Healthtech Institute

4:05 pm

Innovative Practices Awards

Joseph Cerro, Independent Consultant

Chris Dwan, Independent Consultant, Dwan, LLC

Allison Proffitt, Editorial Director, Bio-IT World

The Innovative Practices Awards recognizes and celebrates innovation that advances life sciences research. Bio-IT World is currently accepting entries for the 2023 Innovative Practices Awards, a competition designed to recognize partnerships and projects pushing our industry forward. Winners will be announced in mid-April 2023, recognized during the Tuesday May 16 Plenary Keynote Program, and scheduled to give a 30-minute podium presentation about their project during the conference. The deadline for entry is March 3, 2023. For more details about the Awards and to submit an application, visit the official Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Awards page: https://www.bio-itworld.com/Award/.

4:20 pm Plenary Keynote Introduction

David Gosalvez, PhD, Executive Director, Strategy & Informatics Portfolio, Revvity Signals

4:30 pm PLENARY KEYNOTE PRESENTATION:

The Promise of Data, Analytics, and Technology: Fueling Scientific and Medical Breakthroughs

Anastasia Christianson, PhD, Vice President, Global Head of AI, ML, Analytics, and Data, Pfizer Inc.

Edward Cox, Head & General Manager, Digital Health & Medicines (DHM), Pfizer Inc.

The 21st century has been referred to as the Century of Biology. With 90% of the world’s 97 zettabytes of data generated in the past 2 years and 30% of today’s data being healthcare related, how are we using data technology and advanced analytics (artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning) to advance our understanding of disease and deliver “breakthroughs that change patients' lives?”

Welcome Reception in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing5:45 pm

Close of Day7:00 pm

Wednesday, May 17

Registration and Morning Coffee7:00 am

PLENARY KEYNOTE PROGRAM

8:00 am

Plenary Keynote Organizer's Remarks

Allison Proffitt, Editorial Director, Bio-IT World

8:05 am PLENARY KEYNOTE INTRODUCTION:

Life Science Automation Opportunities – So Many Options, So Little Time

Santanu Sen, Vice President, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Virtusa

The COVID pandemic has demonstrated that therapies and vaccines can be developed in 18 months with a high degree of safety and efficacy. Pioneering work done by companies involved has shed light to archaic processes that have been in existence for decades with little need for change.  In this presentation, we will discuss collaborative efforts, enabling technologies, regulation, and workflow to automate these processes to advance personalized medicine initiatives.

8:15 am PLENARY KEYNOTE PRESENTATION:

Federated Futures: How the Largest Federated Learning Effort in Medicine Will Inform Our Next Steps

Spyridon Bakas, PhD, Assistant Professor, Radiology & Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

Raymond Y. Huang, MD, PhD, Division Chief, Neuroradiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Associate Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School

Jason Martin, Principal Engineer AI Research Science, Security Solutions Lab, Intel Labs

Is a federated learning model sufficient to handle data from 71 institutions and more than 6,000 patients located on six continents? Researchers from Penn Medicine and Intel Labs say yes. An interdisciplinary team created the largest to-date global federated learning effort to develop an accurate and generalizable machine learning model for detecting glioblastoma borders. We will share what we learned about creating and maintaining such a federation, how the software infrastructure evolved over the course of the study, and how this work will empower the future of high-quality, precision clinical care worldwide.

Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing9:30 am

Organizer's Welcome Remarks10:15 am

SETTING UP AND SCALING AGILE DATA AND ANALYTICS ECOSYSTEMS

10:20 am

Chairperson's Remarks

Asha Mahesh, Senior Director, Data Science Solutions, Privacy & Ethics, Janssen R&D

10:25 am

Agile IT Infrastructure for R&D Digitalization

Yecheng Huang, PhD, Director, Bristol Myers Squibb Co.

The expectation of the R&D computing environment is much diversified. The growth of machine learning and AI convolutes the requirements of computing ecosystem. An uncomplicated, user-friendly computing environment is highly desired with burst computing capacity and robust tools. The infrastructure design needs to address the challenge of distributed enterprise data gravity in a cost-effective way. Here introduces the build of IT infrastructure leveraging the cloud to meet these demands in the pharm R&D field.

10:55 am

Creating a Secure and Scalable AWS Cloud Landing Zone for Biotech Start-Ups

Drew Dresser, Director, Cloud Engineering, Flagship Pioneering

In today's fast-paced biotech industry, start-ups need to be able to quickly and securely access the computing resources they need to drive innovation and growth. In this session, we will discuss how to build an AWS cloud landing zone that meets the unique needs of biotech startups. We will cover topics such as designing a multi-account architecture, implementing identity and access management, and deploying security controls and monitoring. By the end of the session, attendees will have a better understanding of how to create a reliable and flexible cloud environment that supports the growth and compliance requirements of their start-ups.

11:25 am

Flexible and Scalable Infrastructure Design to Support Large-Scale Data Science Initiatives

Asha Mahesh, Senior Director, Data Science Solutions, Privacy & Ethics, Janssen R&D

Janssen has leveraged cloud capabilities to implement an ecosystem of platforms and solutions to manage the ever-increasing volume and variety of data and advanced analytical methodologies needed to innovate for our patients. The design offers a community approach, which helps our data scientists learn the latest and greatest techniques from each other and leverage each other’s work. Hence accelerates research and encourages innovation. The flexible and scalable design has resulted in impactful deliverables including AI/ML-driven drug discovery, clinical trial design & clinical operations, and real-world evidence.

11:55 am Securing the Pharma and BioTech Ecosystem, the Evolving Cyber Threat Landscape and Best Practices.

Troy Ament, Healthcare CISO, Fortinet

Pharmaceutical and BioTech organizations continue to be exposed to ransomware attacks with increased impact to business operations.  This fireside chat will provide an executives a guide to understanding how their organization is positioned to protect against emerging ransomware threats and develop compliance with evolving regulations. Learning objectives include providing thought leadership to current cyber security events, impacts to connected medical devices, manufacturing environments and mitigation strategies, sharing industry experience and how they have impacted pharma and biotech, educate leaders on what core security program elements should be in place.

12:25 pm High-Performance Scientific Computing Platform for Structural Biologists

Kshitij Kumar, Founder & CEO, CLOVERTEX

CryoEM is revolutionizing the field of Structure based Drug Design. CryoEM can provide protein structures at the resolutions that are useful for drug discovery. However, CryoEM analysis workflow provides unique challenges for data handling, compute availability, automation, and orchestration. Clovertex is solving these unique challenges using the cloud-based scientific discovery platform for structural biologists, enabling a single click deployment in Customer’s VPC, enabling storing and processing cryo-EM data in the cloud in a scalable and cost-effective manner. The scientific discovery platform provides ability to analyze more structures in a short amount of time and reduce cost of analysis per structure without worrying about undifferentiated heavy lifting in IT infrastructure.

Session Break and Transition to Luncheon Presentation12:55 pm

1:05 pm LUNCHEON PRESENTATION:Cloud Foundations for a Digital R&D Strategy

Jeremy Deane, Chief Architect, Foundation Medicine

Lee Tessler, Principal Tech Strategist for the Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services

Over the last decade, life sciences R&D organizations have pushed the envelope on what’s possible—from ultra-scale computational models, to the processing of large multi-modal data sets, to the use of AI to develop more targeted drug candidates. While these innovations touch different parts of the wet lab and dry lab, they have the common challenges of delivering data to collaborators quickly, making data more accessible to data science, and automating workflows. Many efforts in these areas are stuck in pilot purgatory; the need for a modern digital R&D strategy is urgent. This session will explore the modern data, computing, and machine learning approaches from AWS that are helping life sciences companies benefit from the virtually unlimited scale and agility of operating R&D digitally on the cloud.

Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing1:50 pm

LEVERAGING CLOUD FOR INNOVATION AND COLLABORATION: LESSONS FROM EARLY ADOPTERS

2:35 pm

Chairperson's Remarks

Jobst Loeffler, PhD, Digital Transformation & IT Pharma, Bayer AG

2:40 pm

PRINCE: Building a Cloud-Based Preclinical Information Center to Enable Collaboration and Faster Analysis of Preclinical Study Data

Jobst Loeffler, PhD, Digital Transformation & IT Pharma, Bayer AG

PRINCE is Bayer Pharma’s one-stop shop for all preclinical data. Based on AWS infrastructure the system is being developed for intense user interaction while processing, analyzing, and visualizing data. Regular use case sessions with Early Development users are the basis for selecting and prioritizing new product features which are implemented based on an agile development concept. The talk will provide an overview of Bayer’s Cloud transformation journey and introduce selected product features. Some of these features are a role-based access concept, connectivity to secret data sources, chemical structure search using an interactive editor, and integration of ontologies.

3:10 pm

Life Science Organizations in the Cloud – SNAFUs, FUBARs, and OMG Moments

John Damask, Vice President, Data & Systems Engineering, Flagship Pioneering

This talk will provide some balance to the abundance of cloud adoption success stories. We’ll explore real-world examples from start-ups and big pharma of things that didn’t go quite as expected. Some stories may be familiar, some not, but they all contribute to our understanding of how life science organizations can make best use of the cloud. The experiences presented are with AWS but generalizable to other cloud providers.

3:40 pm

Unifying Access in Multi-Cloud Research Environments

Vas Vasiliadis, Chief Customer Officer, Globus, University of Chicago

Life sciences research environments are rapidly evolving to incorporate increasingly diverse cloud storage and computing resources. Using these multi-cloud environments efficiently requires researchers to integrate multiple components and become familiar with their unique access methods. We present a platform that unifies access to diverse storage and compute resources, both cloud-hosted and on premises, and demonstrate how familiar interfaces allow users to focus on their research and not on technology management.

4:10 pm Accelerating Drug Development through Scalable and Intelligent Computing

Derek McCoy, Head of Channel, Enterprise and Public Sector Sales, Rescale

Whether it’s research for new drug discovery or ways of expediting time to market, many healthcare and life sciences companies are looking to cloud-based scientific computing to accelerate research and development. The applications are countless: from faster drug approvals to improved collaboration, from more rapid vaccine development to helping genomics companies meet strict compliance and security standards. The goal in every case: faster time to market, cost efficiency, performance enhancements, more automation, improved agility and collaboration, ongoing security and compliance, and most importantly the safety and efficacy of new treatments to improve patient outcomes.

Best of Show Awards Reception in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing4:40 pm

Close of Day6:00 pm

Thursday, May 18

Registration and Morning Coffee7:30 am

PLENARY KEYNOTE PROGRAM

8:00 am

Plenary Keynote Organizer's Remarks

Cindy Crowninshield, Executive Event Director, Cambridge Healthtech Institute

Plenary Keynote Sponsor Introduction (Opportunity Available)8:05 am

8:15 am PLENARY PANEL DISCUSSION:

Assessing Innovation: How Pharma Makes Tech Investment Decisions

PANEL MODERATOR:

Aaron Mann, CEO, Clinical Research Data Sharing Alliance

This panel session will assemble senior leaders who evaluate new technology adoption. We will hold an interactive discussion to help provide transparency in the evaluation and decision-making process for assessing and investing in new technologies. Themes we will cover include: 1) process for evaluating, piloting, and scaling new technologies and technology approaches; 2) how an organization evaluates an emerging technology vendor landscape; 3) when and how a formal buying process becomes required, and 4) identifying key stakeholders, decision-makers, and gatekeepers. 

PANELISTS:

April Bingham, Executive Director, Global Medical Compliance and Governance Chapter, Roche

Peter Mesenbrink, PhD, Executive Director, Biostatistics, Novartis Pharmaceuticals

Maria Palombini, Global Practice Leader, Healthcare & Life Sciences, IEEE Standards Association

Laszlo Vasko, Senior Director, Clinical Innovation R&D IT, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing9:30 am

Organizer's Remarks10:15 am

UNIQUE BENEFITS OF CLOUD IN BIOPHARMA: CASE STUDIES AND BEST PRACTICES

10:20 am

Chairperson's Remarks

Bashir Ahmed, PhD, Executive Director, Discovery & Development IT, Incyte Corp.

10:25 am PANEL DISCUSSION:

Cloud Guides Your Biopharma Journey

PANEL MODERATOR:

Mike Tarselli, PhD, CSO, TetraScience, Inc.

Today, technologies like the cloud have become state-of-the-art. After some initial hesitation regarding security and compliance, life sciences companies have understood that leveraging the cloud is necessary to be collaborative, innovative, and competitive. A compelling aspect for organizations of all sizes is its scalability adapting to different situations due to organic growth, acquisitions, or divestitures. In this panel, we will discuss how companies of different sizes can optimize the benefits from the cloud, how the cloud adapts and supports the different stages of a company journey, and what the specific benefits for life sciences companies are.

PANELISTS:

John Damask, Vice President, Data & Systems Engineering, Flagship Pioneering

Asha Mahesh, Senior Director, Data Science Solutions, Privacy & Ethics, Janssen R&D

Yohann Potier, PhD, Director, Data Platform, Tessera Therapeutics, Inc.

10:55 am

Integrating Multi-Vendor Cloud Solutions Using RPA to Create a Seamless Clinical Process

Bashir Ahmed, PhD, Executive Director, Discovery & Development IT, Incyte Corp.

Manually copying and pasting queries from the Safety systems into various study-specific EDC interfaces is an extremely laborious and error-prone swivel chair exercise. Using Robotic Process Automation (RPA), we have automated the process, removed the swivel chairs, and improved compliance and accuracy of Safety query management while saving significant amount of manual effort.

11:25 am

Keeping Up with a Biotech Growth: A Cloud Journey

Yohann Potier, PhD, Director, Data Platform, Tessera Therapeutics, Inc.

Tessera Therapeutics is a cloud-native biotech, with a computational strategy at the core of its scientific platform. As the company grows, its digital environment needs to scale and support the increasing computational demand while providing better operational stability, security, and mature toward compliance with industry standards. This session will cover the buildup of the data science platform: how the cloud environment enabled velocity, collaboration, scale, and maturity.

11:55 am Speeding up science with better instrument data consistency and connectivity

Milton Yu, PhD, Head of Automation and Analytics, Market Strategy, Benchling

Every company conducting scientific R&D faces the same set of challenges when integrating any lab instrument into a scientific process. These R&D teams require accurate, usable instrument data. As these teams scale and accelerate their R&D, they’re using an expanding collection of instruments with proprietary data formats, creating unnecessary hurdles and costly problems throughout the data lifecycle. Hear how we're tackling these industry challenges with innovative, cloud solutions.

 

 

12:25 pm Accelerating the Processing Performance of Cryo-EM Workflows on AWS

James Chen, Ph.D., Head of Structural Bioinformatics, Pharma, Amgen British Columbia

Aniket Deshpande, BD Lead, HPC for Healthcare and Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Roberto Iturralde, Senior Director of Cloud Computing, Software Engineering, Vertex Pharmaceuticals

Rory Kelleher, Director of Healthcare and Life Sciences, North America, NVIDIA

Steve Litster, PhD, Senior Manager - HCLS Compute Specialist, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Edward Pryor, Technology Director, Cryo-EM Workflows, Thermo Fisher Scientific

CryoEM has unlocked the potential for discoveries and treatments but on-premises infrastructure for running these workloads can struggle with scaling up to keep pace with rapidly growing compute and storage demands or scaling down during periods of low activity. In this panel, you will hear how Amgen and Vertex Pharmaceuticals have adapted to the flow of large data sets in the cloud using NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate workloads while decreasing costs.

Session Break and Transition to Luncheon Presentation12:55 pm

1:05 pm LUNCHEON PRESENTATION:Automating Bioinformatics on AWS 2.0

Jon Jiang, COO, MemVerge

A new generation of cloud automation solves 4 key problems: 1) eliminate reliance on IT by such that non-cloud-expert scientists can submit jobs; 2) eliminate Out-Of-Memory errors plaguing RStudio and Jupyter Notebook applications, by checkpointing and restoring apps; 3) eliminate over-provisioning by surfing small and large instances during job runtime; and 4) allows long-running workloads to run on Spot instances by automatically restoring the workload after a Spot termination notice.

Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing1:50 pm

TRENDS FROM THE TRENCHES

2:35 pm

Chairperson's Remarks

Ari E. Berman, PhD, CEO, BioTeam, Inc.

2:40 pm

Trends from the Trenches

Ari E. Berman, PhD, CEO, BioTeam, Inc.

Adam Kraut, Director, Infrastructure & Cloud Architecture, BioTeam, Inc.

Anna Sowa, PhD, Senior Scientific Consultant, BioTeam, Inc.

Since 2010, the “Trends from the Trenches” presentation has been one of the most popular annual traditions of the Bio-IT Program. The intent of the session is to deliver a candid (and occasionally blunt) assessment of the best, the most worthwhile, and the most overhyped information technologies (IT) for life sciences. The presentation has helped scientists, leadership, and IT professionals understand the basic topics related to computing, storage, data transfer, networks, cloud, data science, and machine learning that are involved in supporting data-intensive science. In 2023, consultants from BioTeam will give an overview of the trending issues in life sciences. An interactive Q&A moderated discussion with the audience follows. Come prepared with your questions and commentary for this informative and lively session.

Close of Conference4:10 pm






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