Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s Sixth Annual
Integrated R&D Informatics & Knowledge Management
Supporting Collaboration, Externalization, Globalization & Translational Research
February 10-12, 2014 | Moscone North Convention Center | San Francisco, CA
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
For the past five years, Integrated R&D Informatics & Knowledge Management has brought together senior executives and leaders in R&D informatics from pharma, large biotech and their partners to discuss the latest ways to manage the integration of data from disparate sources to create valuable knowledge for their organizations. This year’s conference will focus on addressing how informatics teams are enabling and supporting internal collaboration along with externalization of data, helping deal with pre-competitive activities, as well as continuing to support translational research, all directed at the overall goal of improving productivity and efficiency in a cost-effective manner.
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Download Brochure
Monday, February 10
10:30 am Conference Program Registration
EXTERNAL COLLABORATION BEST PRACTICES: GETTING VALUE OUT OF DATA WITH YOUR COLLABORATORS
11:50 Chairperson’s Opening Remarks
Martin Leach, Vice President, Research & Development IT, Biogen Idec
12:00 pm Roche’s Translational and Clinical Research Center (TCRC): How Our Big Data and Externalization Strategy Impacts Drug Discovery
Juergen Hammer, Ph.D., MBA, Pharma Research and Early Development Informatics (pREDi), pREDi Center Head; Global Head, Disease & Translational Informatics, Roche Translational Clinical Research Center
Pharmaceutical companies increasingly embed their research and early development organizations into vibrant academic hubs to enhance innovation and asset finding. Roche has recently opened “TCRC, Inc.”, soon to be located in New York City. The presentation will focus on our Big Data and Externalization approaches to support the TCRC, and will exemplify how we impact drug development decisions using informatics.
12:30 The Lilly Open Innovation Drug Discovery Program (OIDD)
Daniel H. Robertson, Ph.D., Senior Director, LRL IT Research, Eli Lilly and Company
Through OIDD, Lilly has established a network of top global research talent at academic and biotech institutions to provide them access to proprietary, in vitro phenotypic, and target-based assays (PD2 and TargetD2). In addition to supplying data that may lead to potential collaborations, Lilly has recently been partnering to deploy additional design tools for OIDD investigators to assist in designing compounds submitted to the assays through this collaboration.
1:00 Session Break
1:15 Luncheon Presentation I: Building and Linking Disease and Drug Target Profiles Using Semantic Search Technologiesnt
Maria Shkrob, Ph.D.,Senior Bioinformatics Scientist, Elsevier
Researchers face a growing challenge in managing vast quantities of unstructured data to find relevant information that can guide their research. A new semantic search engine that incorporates text-mining capability along with customizable dictionaries and taxonomies rapidly finds facts and provides summary tables from multiple sources, including scientific abstracts and full-texts, grant applications, and in-house documents. This ability to accurately retrieve and summarize information significantly increases researcher productivity compared to traditional keyword search.
1:45 Luncheon Presentation II (Sponsorship Opportunity Available)
2:15 Session Break
2:30 Chairperson’s Remarks
Martin Leach, Vice President, Research & Development IT, Biogen Idec
2:35 Building an Informatics Ecosystem for Externalized R&D
Sándor Szalma, Ph.D., Head, External Innovation, R&D IT, Janssen Research & Development, LLC
Pharma companies have historically been involved in many partnerships fueling their discovery engines, supported with non-optimal IT systems. With recent wide-spread adaptation of hosted solutions and cloud computing, there is an opportunity now to implement informatics solutions such that collaborative exploration of the data generated in partnerships becomes possible. We also discuss the opportunities to build parts of the ecosystem in a pre-competitive manner and our experience in deploying open source tools.
3:05 Cloud Solutions Spanning Applications across R&D, Development, G&A, and Compliance Functions
John Reynders, CIO, Moderna Therapeutics; former Vice President, Research & Development Information, AstraZeneca
This presentation will overview Moderna’s aggressive push into cloud solutions spanning applications across R&D, development, G&A, and compliance functions. Moderna’s cloud-based informatics workflows for the design, development, screening, and delivery of messenger RNA therapeutics will be shared along with associated challenges of Big Data, cloud security, collaboration, and cross-cloud integration.
3:35 PANEL DISCUSSION: Approaches and Lessons Learned to Build a Comprehensive R&D Search Capability
Martin Leach, Vice President, Research & Development IT, Biogen Idec
The accessibility of information within any R&D organization is key to the successful collaboration and development of a research pipeline. The holy grail for most research organizations is the one-stop search (aka. Google-like search for R&D). In this panel we will discuss the approaches a number of research organizations have taken, successes, failures and lessons learned.
Panelists:
John Koch, Director, Scientific Information Architecture & Search, Merck
Hongmei Huang, Ph.D., Director, NIBR IT, Novartis
4:05 Efficient Data Mining for Precision Medicine
Sirimon O’Charoen, Ph.D., Manager, Translational Medicine, Life Sciences Professional Services, Thomson Reuters
4:35 Refreshment Break and Transition to Plenary Keynote
5:00 Plenary Keynote Session (Click Here For More Details)
6:15 Grand Opening Reception in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
7:45 Close of Day
Tuesday, February 11
7:00 am Registration and Morning Coffee
8:00 Plenary Keynote Session (Click Here For More Details)
9:15 Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
REGISTRATION SYSTEMS
10:25 Chairperson’s Remarks
Arturo J. Morales, Ph.D., Global Lead, Biology Platform Informatics, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research
10:30 Registration Systems: Applications or Data Stores?
Arturo J. Morales, Ph.D., Global Lead, Biology Platform Informatics, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research
Registration systems are not applications that usually stand on their own. Their value comes from the enablement of downstream data analysis and sample tracking through proper management of concept and sample metadata. As such, most registration systems offer little intrinsic value to those that use it directly and user compliance can be a challenge. Thus, it is important to adapt to workflows, as opposed to making users adapt to them.
11:00 Development of a LIMS Platform to Manage Biological Therapeutics
David M. Sedlock, Ph.D., Senior Director, Research & Development Systems, Takeda Cambridge US
The management of biological samples for testing as biotherapeutic agents requires a unique type of LIMS to handle both workflows and sample registration. We are currently engaged in a couple of projects at Takeda to create a working solution for both research and preclinical development samples to be managed across multiple R&D sites. The project status and business impact will be reviewed.
11:30 An Enhanced Electronic Laboratory Notebook to Support Biologics Research and Development
Beth Basham, Ph.D., Director, Account Management, Biologics Discovery & IT Site Lead, Merck
Merck is evolving our electronic lab notebook from a straightforward paper notebook replacement to a platform that structures data and results, provides basic LIMS-like capabilities and enables powerful search and analytics. We will share our experiences in providing a solution to support some of the stages of biologics research and development.
12:00 pm Biological Registration Systems at UCB and How They Integrate into the Discovery Workflow
David Lee, Ph.D., Principal Scientist, Informatics, UCB
The benefits of informatics-driven data management systems are well known in the small molecule therapeutics arena. Extending these systems to supporting biotherapeutics presents a number of challenges. We present a novel data management system, BioQuest, integrating bespoke and best in class software systems designed to capture and integrate NBE data at UCB. We will focus on registration systems, in particular on the antibody and non-antibody protein registration system based on the Genedata Biologics platform.
12:30 Session Break
12:40 Luncheon Presentation I
Speaker to be Announced
1:10 Luncheon Presentation II (Sponsorship Opportunity Available)
1:40 Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
PRE-COMPETITIVE COLLABORATION & SUPPORTING PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS
2:15 Chairperson’s Remarks
Barry Bunin, Ph.D., CEO, Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD, Inc.)
2:20 Modern Drug Research Informatics Applications to CNS, Infectious, Neglected, Rare, and Commercial Diseases
Barry Bunin, Ph.D., CEO, Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD, Inc.)
There are currently hundreds of commodity technologies for handling scientific information – each with its own scope and limitations. The application of collaborative technologies to interrogate potency, selectively, and therapeutic windows of small molecule structure activity relationship (SAR) data will be presented in 5 case studies. Given external (public and collaborative) data grows faster than internal data, novel collaborative technologies to gracefully manage combined external and private data provide an ever-increasing competitive advantage.
2:50 tranSMART: Use Cases from Deployments Highlighting Emerging Models for Pre-Competitive Collaboration and Open Source Sustainability
Dan Housman, CTO, Translational Research, Recombinant By Deloitte
The tranSMART open source translational research knowledge management software continues to make forward progress since the initial release in 2012. Specific use cases from a variety of projects incorporating tranSMART will be walked through to highlight emerging pre-competitive collaboration models including opportunities, new capabilities, and unresolved challenges. The current state of open project sustainability and approaches taken by Recombinant and other groups to ensure the software increases in value for adopters will be explored.
3:20 The Innovative Medicines Initiative: Collaborating around Knowledge Management
Anthony Rowe, Ph.D., Principal Scientist, External Innovation, Johnson & Johnson
The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is a public-private partnership between the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industry and Associates (EFPIA) and the European Union. It is dedicated to overcoming key bottlenecks in pharmaceutical research by enabling pre-competitive collaboration between industry and academic scientists. In this talk we will review the Knowledge Management activities undertaken by the IMI and how they are delivering new services and capabilities that can enhance pharmaceutical R&D.
3:50 Bringing Scientific Data to Life: Agile Data Access and Analysis from Discovery to Development
Jonathan Feldmann, Vice President, Scientific Informatics, Certara
4:20 Valentine’s Day Celebration in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
5:20 Breakout Discussions in the Exhibit Hall
These interactive discussion groups are open to all attendees, speakers, sponsors, & exhibitors. Participants choose a specific breakout discussion group to join. Each group has a moderator to ensure focused discussions around key issues within the topic. This format allows participants to meet potential collaborators, share examples from their work, vet ideas with peers, and be part of a group problem-solving endeavor. The discussions provide an informal exchange of ideas and are not meant to be a corporate or specific product discussion.
Collaboration, Externalization and Privacy
Micahel H. Elliott, CEO, Atrium Research & Consulting
-
At what extent is data exchange required in the era of R&D virtualization?
-
How do we balance ollaboration with security risk?
-
What tools are required to enable virtualization? Will these be vendor supplied or custom?
Biological Registration Systems
Arturo J. Morales, Ph.D., Global Lead, Biology Platform Informatics, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research
-
How do we implement systems that users want to use?
-
What are some good practices?
-
Where are data standards making a difference?
Data Integration Today
Ajay Shah, Ph.D., Director, Research Informatics, City of Hope National Medical Center
-
Building extensible software platform for integrating basic, clinical and translational research data – technology, data and cultural challenges
-
Integrating deeper analysis and natural language processing tools to leverage the platform for translational research
-
Case studies from participants and discussion
Translational Informatics
Shoibal Datta, Director, Data Sciences, Biogen Idec
-
What does the perfect translational informatics platform look like and how do we get there?
-
Where does translation stop?
-
What does the Affordable Care Act mean to the future of Real World Evidence
6:30 Close of Day
Wednesday, February 12
7:00 am Breakfast Presentation (Sponsorship Opportunity Available) or Morning Coffee
8:00 Plenary Keynote Session (Click Here For More Details)
9:45 Refreshment Break and Poster Competition Winner Announced in the Exhibit Hall
DATA INTEGRATION & SHARING: TOOLS AND POLICIES FOR VISUALIZATION AND ANALYSIS
10:35 Chairperson’s Remarks
Larry Hunter, Ph.D., Director, Center for Computational Pharmacology & Computational Bioscience Program, Professor, Pharmacology, University of Colorado
10:40 Knowledge-Based Analysis at Genomic Scale
Larry Hunter, Ph.D., Director, Center for Computational Pharmacology & Computational Bioscience Program, Professor, Pharmacology, University of Colorado
High-throughput instruments and the explosion of new results in the scientific literature is both a blessing and a curse to the bench researcher. Effective design and implementation of computational tools that genuinely facilitate the generation of novel and significant scientific insights remains poorly understood. This talk presents efforts that combine natural language processing for information extraction, graphical network models for semantic data integration, and some novel user interface approaches into a system that has facilitated several significant discoveries.
11:00 Combining Visual Analytics and Parallel Computing for Data-Driven Analysis Pipeline Selection and Optimization to Support the Big Data to Knowledge Transformation
Richard Scheuermann, Director, Informatics, J. Craig Venter Institute
This presentation describes our efforts at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in collaboration with the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in the development of a high performance cyber-infrastructure that combines visual analytics and parallel computing for data-driven selection and optimization of analytical pipelines based on objective performance metrics. We demonstrate the application of these principles and infrastructure for the analysis of genome-wide gene expression and high-throughput, high dimensional flow cytometry data in clinical and translational research settings.
11:20 Real World Evidence for Pharma: Improving Traditional Research by Enhancing Real World Data Environment
Arpit Davé, Director, IT, Bristol-Myers Squibb
Life sciences organizations have started to change the way they discover, develop, and commercialize medicines to address patient, regulators and payer needs at every stage of the product lifecycle. Real world data (longitudinal and integrated patient information) is the key to answering complex questions in R&D and product commercialization. In order to access patient data across boundaries, companies and regulators are experimenting with various data and analytics collaboration models. This talk presents key lessons learned.
11:40 Spotfire Templates for Analysis & Visualization of Project Data
Sandhya Sreepathy, PMP, Head of Operations, Global Discovery Chemistry, Novartis
There has been a significant increase in the usage of Spotfire by project teams in Emeryville for visualization and analysis of data. To help streamline development activity and support the needs of project teams with data analysis and visualization, NIBR-IT in collaboration with computational chemistry group in Emeryville developed project based Spotfire templates. Templates were built leveraging existing technologies for retrieval/import of data and incorporated common elements of analysis and visualization(scaffold assignment, ligand, lipophilic efficiency, activity ratios, r-group decomposition etc). Predefined visualizations and filters helped accelerate project team decision making.
12:10 pm Session Break
12:20 Luncheon Presentation (Sponsorship Opportunity Available) or Lunch on Your Own
1:00 Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall and Last Chance for Poster Viewing
HOW BIG DATA WILL DRIVE RESEARCH FORWARD
1:40 Chairperson’s Remarks
Michael H. Elliott, CEO, Atrium Research & Consulting LLC
1:45 Harnessing Big Data to Accelerate Drug Development
Vinod Kumar, Ph.D., Senior Investigator, Computational Biology, GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals
With the rapid development of high-throughput technologies and ever-increasing accumulation of whole genome-level datasets, an increasing number of diseases and drugs can be comprehensively characterized by the changes they induce in gene expression, protein, metabolites and phenotypes. Integrating and querying such large volumes of data, often spanning domains and residing in diverse sources, constitutes a significant obstacle. This talk presents two distinct approaches that utilize these data types to systematically evaluate and suggest new disease indications for new and existing drugs.
2:15 Drug Process Design Improvement based on Data Management and Analysis
Valérie Vermylen, Knowledge Management, Director, GPS, UCB
Most of the scientific process data generated are not free to access, even if managed in databases. At UCB, data was recently made available including its context. It allows process developers to draw easily designed space and define critical parameters. To support investigation studies as impact analysis, manufacturing dashboards and trends are automatically published. An example of correlation between process data and patients’ clinical responses will be presented as an illustration of advanced data analysis.
2:45 The Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS) Information FramEwork (LIFE)
Stephan C. Schürer, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Pharmacology, Center for Computational Science at Miller School of Medicine, University of Miami
The NIH-funded LINCS consortium is producing an extensive dataset of cellular response signatures to a variety of small molecule and genetic perturbations. We have been developing the LINCS Information FramEwork (LIFE) – a specialized knowledge-driven search system for LINCS data.
3:15 An Enhanced Molecular Design Platform That Fosters Ideation, Knowledge Transfer, and Collaboration
John Conway, Enterprise Informatics, Schrödinger, Inc.
Drug discovery is the ultimate team sport. Schrödinger is developing a collaborative and knowledge engineered platform—LiveDesign—to help scientists not only capture their ideas and best practices, but to exploit and share these with select team members. Above and beyond the aggregation of 2D data, this platform will allow users to bring together 3D data with its associated annotations. LiveDesign will ultimately lead to better patient outcomes, promoting better scientific communication by exposing data, ideas, and colleague feedback during the design and redesign phases of molecular discovery.
3:45 Refreshment Break
FROM BIG DATA TO TRANSLATIONAL INFORMATICS
4:00 Chairperson’s Remarks
Shoibal Datta, Ph.D., Director, Data Sciences, Biogen Idec
4:05 Designing and Building a Data Sciences Capability to Support R&D and Corporate Big Data Needs
Shoibal Datta, Ph.D., Director, Data Sciences, Biogen Idec
To achieve Biogen Idec’s strategic goals, we have built a cross-disciplinary team to focus on key areas of interest and the required capabilities. To provide a reusable set of IT services we have broken down our platform to focus on the Ingestion, Digestion, Extraction and Analysis of data. In this presentation, we will outline how we brought focus and prioritization to our data sciences needs, our data sciences architecture, lessons learned and our future direction.
4:35 Translational Informatics: Decomposing to Singularity
John Shon, M.D., Head, Translational Informatics IT, Johnson & Johnson
There has been an explosion of data across discovery, development, and beyond and all informatics groups are struggling with major challenges in computation, storage and analysis. In a large pharmaceutical environment, the value propositions of informatics lie primarily in three dimensions which I describe. In the larger hyperdynamic environments of research technologies, information technologies, and modern science, interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches become imperative to execute translational strategies effectively.
5:05 Integrating Translational Research Tools
Erik Bierwagen, Ph.D., Principal Programmer Analyst, Department of Bioinformatics, Genentech, Inc.
This talk will cover our efforts at creating an integrated informatics system for animal studies from birth to death and beyond. Our efforts span many different disciplines and groups, but share the common effort of integrating data seamlessly.
5:35 Close of Conference Program
Leave a Reply