Since 2003, Bio-IT World has hosted an elite awards program with the goal of highlighting outstanding examples of how technology innovations and strategic initiatives are being applied to advance life sciences research. The 2025 Innovative Practices Awards winners represent excellence in innovation in the areas of informatics, manufacturing and process development, FAIR standards, patient privacy, and next generation drug design. Companies driving the winning entries include Genmab, Genedata, NHS England, IQVIA, Pistoia Alliance, Regeneron, and Quris-AI. Winners of the Innovative Practices Awards as well as those earning Honorable Mention will present their solutions, revealing the keys to their programs' success. This exclusive session provides a unique opportunity to gain insights into why our judges selected these entries as the best of the best.

The Pistoia Alliance has achieved an industry first with the creation of its FAIR Maturity Matrix—an easy-to-use self-assessment tool that measures organizational leadership and technical maturity. Over 20 industry experts collaborated to create the tool, successfully simplifying and standardizing the many complex processes involved in FAIR data implementation. The Maturity Matrix is designed to help organizations benchmark and maximize their investment in FAIR, whatever their level of maturity—from those getting started with their FAIR journey to those looking to understand how to move to the next level. It is being adopted by national research and funding organizations, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies of all sizes, consultancies, and technology providers. Ultimately, it will help the industry to unlock data siloes, successfully adopt emerging technologies to power data-led decisions, and work together to reduce the time and cost of bringing new therapies to market to meet unmet patient needs.

Over the next decade, the UK National Health Service (NHS) is moving towards a data-enabled ecosystem with a connected, consistent data architecture. This will put patient data to work to optimize national insights and enable improved healthcare. A key challenge is ensuring compliance, including data auditability and protection, whilst optimizing data usability for crucial insights. The NHS-PET (Privacy Enhancing Technology) is a configurable platform powered by IQVIA Privacy Analytics which provides a secure, scalable solution for the auditing and privacy treatment of patient data within NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP). Benefits realized from PET include cutting waiting times and offering new virtual services. For example, hospital trusts using FDP with integrated PET have treated on average 114 more inpatients in theatres every month since platform introduction (1). Implementing this vision of shared digital infrastructure across NHSE can benefit care provision across over 500 acute, specialist or community hospitals.

Chromatography is the workhorse for analytical assessment and purification of biotherapeutics at biopharma companies worldwide. As chromatography workflow data grows exponentially, biopharma developability teams face increasing challenges in data capture, processing, collaboration, and result assessment. The result is often error-prone processes, poor scalability, and inefficiencies in resources, time, and costs. To address these challenges, Genedata and Genmab developed Chromatics—a central, integrated software platform for chromatography data management. This hardware-agnostic, digitalized solution eliminates manual processes, automates data processing, enhances AI/ML readiness, and accelerates biomolecule development for global project teams.

A leader in AI-driven drug safety, Quris-AI’s patented Bio-AI approach integrates AI, patient-on-chip biology, real-time sensing, and genetically diverse stem-cell-derived tissue. Its automated platform generates and collects data on millions of interactions between known drugs and organs on a chip, and then uses this data to train its advanced AI platform. This technology solves the core clinical prediction challenge – predicting, before expensive clinical trials, which drug candidates will work safely and ecaciously in the human body to focus resources, time, and budget on the drugs with the most potential. In a blinded, joint study with top pharma partners, Quris’ Bio-AI approach outperformed existing safety prediction approaches, while reducing costs by 90%. Recent honors: Fast Company's World's Most Innovative Companies; SCRIP innovation award for “closing the clinical prediction gap”; Frost & Sullivan for “AI-based drug safety prediction excellence”; and “AI innovator changing the drug development paradigm” by Clarivate.

In vitro assays are crucial for assessing the safety and efficacy of active substances, metabolites, and impurities in Investigational New Drug (IND) and New Drug Application (NDA) submissions. However, inconsistent data standards for in vitro pharmacology (IVP) have hindered efficient in vitro testing and regulatory review. The Pistoia Alliance has addressed this issue through a public-private partnership with regulators at the FDA, working collaboratively with biopharmaceutical industry stakeholders including Abbvie, Novartis, Roche, Pfizer, Amgen, Eurofins, Zifo, Scibite, L’Hasa Limited, and Curl Research. Efforts have standardized the way in which in vitro results are submitted using defined ontology and processes and using FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles to ensure data is consistent, human and machine-readable, and easily reused for multiple regulatory submissions. Development of a repository of assays, linked to result templates, improves data transparency and enhances analysis capacity, improving efficiency, compliance, and safety while accelerating drug development.