The life science community is trying to move past the crisis management response necessitated by the pandemic and build agile, insightful, and collaborative strategies for the future. The recently concluded BioIT World conference brought together experts from different fields to discuss new science, emerging trends, and breakthrough innovations. Stay abreast with this quick round-up of event highlights and use it to calibrate your investments better.

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The Bio-IT World conference is a premier event showcasing technologies and analytic approaches that solve problems, accelerate science, and drive the future of precision medicine. The 21st annual BioIT world conference was conducted in May 2022. The event drives collaboration across a global community of leading life sciences, pharmaceutical, clinical, healthcare, informatics, and technology experts in the fields of biomedical research, drug discovery & development, and healthcare.

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“Bio-IT World is always THE event for pharma/ life science and data technology to meet, see the latest trends in the industry, and get in touch with the community”

‍- Director, Solutions Delivery, Ontoforce

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Evolving Trends in the Life Science Industry

The scope and scale of data generation have increased exponentially over the past decade due to the development of sophisticated high precision instruments and various high throughput technologies. Life science research groups have diversified from a community of biologists to include multi-disciplinary experts such as bioinformaticians, statisticians, data scientists, ML engineers, and computational biologists.

Experts state that while collecting data is expensive in itself, the challenge is further compounded by the requirement for additional cleaning/validation owing to human errors. In essence, there is a need for solutions that can manage and mine data both efficiently and accurately. This represents a paradigm shift in life science research with data generation taking a backseat and data-driven insight generation using AI getting the spotlight.

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Innovation Practices Awards, May 2022

‍The evolving trends are clearly manifested in the BioIT World’s Innovation Practices Award(s). Time and again, the awards are presented to products that solve important topical problems in life science research, present novel solutions and deliver an ROI. E.g. while the awards emphasized ‘Best practices' in drug discovery and clinical trials in 2003, the focus shifted to rewarding ‘Innovative utilization of life science equipment, informatics, and information technology' in 2015. A similar shift was visible again when from ‘Data integration & management’ in 2018, the spotlight was put on ‘Machine learning for outpatient treatment’ in 2021. The transition from innovation in science to innovation in technology - to eventually generating actionable insights from data, is slow but consistent.

This year’s awards highlights include:

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- CellPort Cell Culture Suite: A low code, domain-agnostic Software-as-a-Service product, the role-based system includes separate modules for managing inventory, equipment, reagent, cell, protocol/SOP, and users.
- Cerebras CS-2 Artificial Intelligence System: An AI supercomputer that accelerates training by 1000X and uses the industry-standard machine learning (ML) frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch to train and use huge biological datasets effectively.  
- Mastermind Disease-Specific Curated Content: Mastermind uses AI-driven genomics to accelerate variant interpretation. Access to disease-specific curated content will increase clinical diagnostic rates and will increase clinician awareness of the disease and appropriate treatment of patients.
- Modak Nabu 2.5: An integrated data engineering platform that converges data ingestion, data profiling, data indexing, and data exploration into a unified platform, driven by metadata. The integrative approach helps to automate and augment many repetitive tasks.
- CENtree 2.1: A centralized, enterprise-ready resource for ontology management. It transforms maintaining and releasing ontologies.
- Memory Machine: MemVerge Memory Machine is the first in a new class of Big Memory Software that allows the pool of lower-cost memory to be accessed without changes to an application, allowing terabytes of cell data to be managed at the speed of memory.

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Emerging Technologies / The Way Forward
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The industry leaders made a clear case for modernizing life science research using integrative techniques that deliver the following:

• Significantly reduce the time to develop candidate drugs
• Offer high-quality data that can provide stratified insights for developing precision medicines.
• Execute high-performance analytics

Notwithstanding the size of your organization - big or small, it may be an opportune time to start investing resources in managing research data (private and proprietary) right at the onset by using state-of-the-art technologies before the volume and quality gets unwieldy.

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References:

‍1. Bio IT World judges community honor six outstanding new products

2. Bio IT World Innovation Awards

3. Ten year trends Covid's impact where Dagdigian was wrong

4. About BioIT World

5. Data transformation: AI and data platforms that work