Track 9 Pharmaceutical R&D Informatics: Collaboration, Data Science and Biologics @ BioIT World, April 29 – May 1, 2014 Seaport World Trade Center, Boston, MA
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
April 30, 2014
Big Data and Data Science in R&D and Translational Research
10:50 Chairperson’s Remarks
Ralph Haffner, Local Area Head, Research Informatics, F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG
11:00 Can Data Science Save Pharmaceutical R&D?
Jason M. Johnson, Ph.D., Associate Vice President,
Scientific Informatics & Early Development and Discovery Sciences IT, Merck
Although both premises – that the viability of pharmaceutical R&D is mortally threatened and that modern “data science” is a relevant superhero – are
suspect, it is clear that R&D productivity is progressively declining and many areas of R&D suboptimally use data in decision-making. We will discuss
some barriers to our overdue information revolution, and our strategy for overcoming them.
11:30 Enabling Data Science in Externalized Pharmaceutical R&D
Sándor Szalma, Ph.D., Head, External Innovation, R&D IT,
Janssen Research & Development, LLC
Pharmaceutical companies have historically been involved in many external partnerships. With recent proliferation of hosted solutions and the availability
of cost-effective, massive high-performance computing resources there is an opportunity and a requirement now to enable collaborative data science. We
discuss our experience in implementing robust solutions and pre-competitive approaches to further these goals.
12:00 pm Co-Presentation: Sponsored by
Collaborative Waveform Analytics: How New Approaches in Machine Learning and Enterprise Analytics will Extend Expert Knowledge and Improve Safety Assessment
- Tim Carruthers, CEO, Neural ID
- Scott Weiss, Director, Product Strategy, IDBS
Neural ID’s Intelligent Waveform Service (IWS) delivers the only enterprise biosignal analysis solution combining machine learning with human expertise. A collaborative platform supporting all phases of research and development, IWS addresses a significant unmet need, delivering scalable analytics and a single interoperable data format to transform productivity in life sciences. By enabling analysis from BioBook (IDBS) to original biosignals, IWS enables users of BioBook to evaluate cardio safety assessment across the R&D lifecycle.
12:15 Building a Life Sciences Data
Sponsored by
Lake: A Useful Approach to Big Data
Ben Szekely, Director & Founding Engineer,
Cambridge Semantics
The promise of Big Data is in its ability to give us technology that can cope with overwhelming volume and variety of information that pervades R&D informatics. But the challenges are in practical use of disconnected and poorly described data. We will discuss: Linking Big Data from diverse sources for easy understanding and reuse; Building R&D informatics applications on top of a Life Sciences Data Lake; and Applications of a Data Lake in Pharma.
12:40 Luncheon Presentation I:
Sponsored by
Chemical Data Visualization in Spotfire
Matthew Stahl, Ph.D., Senior Vice President,
OpenEye Scientific Software
Spotfire deftly facilitates the analysis and interrogation of data sets. Domain specific data, such as chemistry, presents a set of challenges that general data analysis tools have difficulty addressing directly. Fortunately, Spotfire is an extensible platform that can be augmented with domain specific abilities. Spotfire has been augmented to naturally handle cheminformatics and chemical data visualization through the integration of OpenEye toolkits. The OpenEye chemistry extensions for Spotfire will be presented.
1:10 Luncheon Presentation II
1:50 Chairperson’s Remarks
Yuriy Gankin, Ph.D., Co. Founder and CSO, GGA Software Services
1:55 Enable Translational Science by Integrating Data across the R&D Organization
Christian Gossens, Ph.D., Global Head, pRED Development Informatics Team,
pRED Informatics, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.
Multi-national pharmaceutical companies face an amazingly complex information management environment. The presentation will show that
a systematic system landscaping approach is an effective tool to build a sustainable integrated data environment. Data integration is not mainly about
technology, but the use and implementation of it.
2:25 The Role of Collaboration in Enabling Great Science in the Digital Age: The BARD Data Science Case Study
Andrea DeSouza, Director, Informatics & Data Analysis,
Broad Institute
BARD (BioAssay Research Database) is a new, public web portal that uses a standard representation and common language for organizing chemical biology data. In this talk, I describe how data professionals and scientists collaborated to develop BARD, organize the NIH Molecular Libraries Program data, and create a new standard for bioassay data exchange.
May 1. 2014
BIG DATA AND DATA SCIENCE IN R&D AND TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH
10:30 Chairperson’s Opening Remarks
John Koch, Director, Scientific Information Architecture & Search, Merck
10:35 The Role of a Data Scientist in Drug Discovery and Development
Anastasia (Khoury) Christianson, Ph.D., Head, Translational R&D IT, Bristol-
Myers Squibb
A major challenge in drug discovery and development is finding all the relevant data, information, and knowledge to ensure informed, evidencebased
decisions in drug projects, including meaningful correlations between preclinical observations and clinical outcomes. This presentation will describe
where and how data scientists can support pharma R&D.
11:05 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.
11:35 Data Experts: Improving Sponsored by
Translational Drug-Development Efficiency
Jamie MacPherson, Ph.D., Consultant, Tessella
We report on a novel approach to translational informatics support: embedding Data Experts’ within drug-project teams. Data experts combine first-line
informatics support and Business Analysis. They help teams exploit data sources that are diverse in type, scale and quality; analyse user-requirements and prototype potential software solutions. We then explore scaling this approach from a specific drug development team to all.