By Bio-IT World Staff
April 22, 2010 | BOSTON—Bio-IT World has just announced the winners of its sixth Best Practices Awards program. Grand Prize winners from six life sciences awards categories were Bristol-Myers Squibb, The Scripps Research Institute, PROOF / iCAPTURE Centre of Excellence, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Centocor R&D, and FDA. The competition’s second Judges’ Prize was awarded to goBalto.com; the Editors’ Choice Award was awarded to Merck and Co. and the competition’s first Community Service Prize recognizing excellence in open source was awarded to the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Established in 2003, Bio-IT World’s Best Practices Awards Program recognizes these organizations for their outstanding innovations and excellence in the use of technologies, practices, and novel business strategies that will advance drug discovery, development, biomedical research, and clinical trials.
Bio-IT World’s Best Practices Awards ceremony was held this evening at the World Trade Center in Boston, Mass., co-located with CHI’s eighth annual Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. Key industry leaders attended the ceremony, which featured a keynote speech by James (Jamie) Heywood, co-founder and chairman of PatientsLikeMe.com, a social networking community based in Cambridge, Mass., that gives patients unprecedented control and access to their health care information and the ability to compare it to other people.
Phillips Kuhl, co-founder and president of Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI), started the evening with welcoming comments and introduced Kevin Davies, Ph.D., editor-in-chief of Bio-IT World, the flagship publication of CHI, to initiate the presentation of awards.
“We are really delighted that this year’s Bio-IT World Best Practices Awards attracted a record number of entrants and that the quality was so remarkably high across all the categories. It made the judges’ task all the harder this year, but they seemed to enjoy it,” said Kevin Davies, editor-in-chief of Bio-IT World.
“This year’s winners include some truly outstanding and innovative examples of new technology and collaboration, and we’re delighted that we’ve been able to recognize some compelling examples of open-source initiatives and innovation in areas such as virtual conferencing that suggest new ways of sharing knowledge and data.”
A peer-review panel of 15 expert judges reviewed a record 74 detailed submissions from organizations ranging from large pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, academic institutions, to niche service providers, detailing best practices in one of six categories. Allison Proffitt, managing editor of Bio-IT World; Grant Stephen, CEO, Tessella; Ron Ranauro, CEO, GenomeQuest; Phillips Kuhl; and Kevin Davies presented the Grand Prize trophies to the following organizations within these categories:
• Research & Discovery: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Identifying Drug Effects via Pathway Alterations using an Integer Linear Programming Optimization Formulation on Phosphoproteomic Data
• Clinical Trials: FDA
Common Table of Contents: allows FDA reviewers to review eCTD submissions for technical accuracy
(nominated by GlobalSubmit)
• IT & Informatics: The Scripps Research Institute
Procurement Transformation: an online marketplace that allows researchers to acquire the supplies they need much faster and at a lower cost.
(nominated by SciQuest)
• IT & Informatics/HPC: Bristol-Myers Squibb, Research & Development
High Content Screening – Road: a system for managing HCS images and analysis and enabling target identification, lead discovery, lead evaluation and lead profiling.
• Knowledge Management: Centocor R&D, Inc. (a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson)
tranSMART: a system allowing Johnson & Johnson researchers to query the company’s drug discovery and development data using a single tool.
(nominated by Recombinant Data Corp)
• Personalized & Translational Medicine: PROOF / iCAPTURE Centre of Excellence
Semantic Data Integration, Knowledge Building and Sharing Applied to Biomarker Discovery and Patient Screening for Pre-symptomatic Heart, Lung or Kidney Failure in Transplantation Medicine
(nominated by IO Informatics)
• Judges’ Prize: goBalto.com
The fastest, most effective way to connect with life science service providers
• Editors’ Choice Award: Merck and Co.
A Virtual Technology Symposium
• Community Service Prize: Royal Society of Chemistry
ChemSpider: a free database containing over 23 million unique chemical entities,
(nominated by Collaborative Drug Discovery)
The following entries received honorable mentions:
• Amylin; Virtual Data Center
• Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego (nominated by Convey Computer Corporation); InsPecT: Fast database search for post-transitional modified spectra
• University of California San Francisco; Epilepsy Phenome Genome Project
• HUNT Research Centre & Biobank (nominated by Thermo Fisher Scientific); Thermo Scientific Nautilus LIMS for Biobanks significantly increases throughput at Hunt Research Centre and Biobank
• Merck & Co. (nominated by BioFortis); Biomarker Data Integration
• Lahey Clinic (nominated by Orion Health); Medical Applications Portal Installation
• Genstruct / Pfizer GRD; Causal Network Model of 2-Butoxyethanol-Induced Hemangiosarcoma in Mice and Its Relevance to Humans
• AstraZeneca; AstraZeneca Patient Safety New Case Handling Operating Model
• Merck Research Laboratories (nominated by MaxisIT); ADAPT Dashboard Prototype
• Kendle; TrialEAS: web-based adjudication system
Criteria and Judging
Awards finalists and winners were selected for their innovative utilization of bio-IT, including life science equipment, informatics and information technology, on a project or organizational level to achieve significantly improved results (i.e. improvements in productivity or conceptual breakthroughs in scientific understanding or process methodology). The peer review judges applied several criteria to make their decisions, such as innovation, significance, and industry impact. Entries were accepted from R&D and scientific facilities and labs in pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, academia, government, medical or related institutions and organizations, as well as public and private research labs.
Joining the Bio-IT World editors in judging the entries was a distinguished panel of experts:
• Al Doig, CHI Insight Pharma Reports
• Alan Louie, IDC Health Insights
• Bill Van Etten, The BioTeam
• Craig Lipset, Pfizer
• Derek Debe, Abbott Laboratories
• Jonathan Usuka, Celgene
• Joseph Cerro, The Schooner Group
• Martin Gollery, Tahoe Informatics
• Michael Rosenberg, Health Decisions
• Noemi Greyzdorf, IDC
• Phillips Kuhl, Cambridge Healthtech Institute
• Sandy Aronson, Harvard Medical School
• Saul Kravitz, CLC Bio
• Stephen Fogelson, Develotron
• Susan Ward, Consultant
Sponsors generously underwriting the 2010 Best Practices Awards are Tessella and GenomeQuest.
The winners will be profiled in the July/August issue of Bio-IT World. The 2011 Bio-IT World Best Practices competition will begin soliciting entries in October 2010.