Bio-IT World Expo | We are less than three months away from the kick off to the 2010 Bio-IT World Expo in Boston, being held from April 20-22. All signs point to a brilliant event, with registrations pouring in and exhibitors scrambling for the final few booths. We hope you’ll consider joining us.
Our confirmed keynotes include Christoph Westphal, co-founder and CEO of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals and senior VP for external drug discovery at GlaxoSmithKline, which snapped up Sirtris for a cool $700 million last year. Sirtris attracted a wealth of media attention for its successful work in developing drugs called sirtuins, which act along the lines of resveratrol, the active ingredient in red wine. Westphal has an unparalleled view of the challenges and opportunities facing the pharma industry, and it will be great to hear how the former venture capitalist and entrepreneur is now trying to innovate pharma from within.
We’ll also welcome John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School, and an authority of electronic medical records, health informatics, and one of the first ten intrepid volunteers for George Church’s Personal Genome Project. Halamka is one of the country’s key figures in the ongoing healthcare debate, advising the government on technology solutions for modernizing health care records, not to mention the challenge of running the IT and data management tools for one of the country’s largest and most prestigious medical schools.
We’ll be announcing our third keynote very shortly, and think it will fit in superbly with the direction of the bio-IT field. Stay tuned!
The opening day, April 20, features a series of pre-conference workshops on topics including cloud computing, imaging informatics, text mining and next-generation sequencing. These are dynamic, information-rich sessions, not to mention fabulous networking opportunities.
Our main conference features seven tracks, from IT infrastructure to bioinformaitcs and next-gen data analysis, cheminformatics and molecular modeling to e-clinical research and e-health. Just a few of our confirmed speakers include Sandy Aronson (Partners Healthcare), Toby Bloom (Broad Institute), Phil Bourne (UCSD/PLoS Computational Biology), Ken Buetow (caBIG), Phil Butcher (Sanger Institute), Stephen Friend (Sage Bionetworks), William Hayes (Biogen-Idec), James Heywood (PatientsLikeMe), Craig Lipset (Pfizer), Pardis Sabeti (Harvard), John Oberington (EMBL-EBI), Eric Perakslis (J&J), and Mollie Shields-Uehling (SAFE-Biopharma).
There are plenty of other highlights as well, including the Benjamin Franklin Award for bioinformatics and the 2010 Best Practices Awards dinner on April 21, where some 200 guests will be the first to learn and hear from the winners of this year’s competition. (There is still time to enter the competition!) And we’re looking forward to the Best Of Show competition, always a competitive event to recognize the most outstanding new products on the exhibit hall floor.
Bio-IT World Expo debuted in 2002, and for those of us associated with the event in all that time, it is incredibly gratifying to see the event truly gaining momentum. Please join us for the show, or if you just want to pop in and hear 1-2 keynotes, apply for a complimentary exhibit hall/keynote pass. See you in April!
Kevin Davies
Editor, Bio-IT World