2014 Bio-IT World Best Practices Call for Entries is Open

By Bio-IT World Staff

October 29, 2013 | The 2014 Bio-IT World Best Practices competition has released its call for entries. Since 2003, Bio-IT World's Best Practices competition has been recognizing outstanding examples of technology and strategic innovation initiatives across the drug discovery enterprise.

The advanced deadline for entry is February 10, 2014; the early deadline is December 16, 2013. The awards attract an elite group of life science professionals: executives, entrepreneurs, innovators, researchers and clinicians responsible for developing and implementing innovative solutions for streamlining the drug development and clinical trial process. Bio-IT World's distinguished peer-review panel of judges has reviewed more than 450 entries in the program's history.

“The Bio-IT World Best Practices Awards have been around long enough for us—as editors and judges—to get a little jaded,” said Bio-IT World editor Allison Proffitt. “But instead, our enthusiasm is renewed each year by the excellent entries, innovative ideas, and passion to better our industry. We expect the 2014 entries to be the best yet, and Bio-IT World is honored to be in a position to share these projects with the industry at large.”

Entries will be accepted in six categories: Clinical & Health-IT; IT infrastructure/HPC; Informatics; Knowledge Management; Research & Drug Discovery; and Personalized & Translational Medicine.

The 2014 winners will receive a crystal award to be presented at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston at a plenary session on April 30, 2014. Winners and entrants will also be featured in Bio-IT World.

For more information on the program and to download the entry form, please visit www.bio-itworld.com/bestpractices.

2013 WINNERS:

Knowledge Management: GlaxoSmithKline (Read News Story)

Socrates Search is a new program that can search through the company’s archived electronic lab notebooks and recognize a vast library of scientific terms, bringing once inaccessible data to scientists’ fingertips.

Clinical and Health IT: Prize4Life and the Neurological Clinical Research Institute (NCRI) at Massachusetts General Hospital (Read News Story)

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research is getting a major boost from a newly launched Pooled Resource Open-access ALS Clinical Trials (PRO-ACT) platform, which has amassed more than 8,500 de-identified clinical patient records into a single, harmonized dataset.

Informatics: Genomic Medicine Institute, Geisinger Health System (Read News Story)

(Nominated by SimulConsult)Geisinger Health System tested SimulConsult’s “Genome-Phenome Analyzer,” which combines a patient’s sequenced genome with the physician’s clinical findings to help determine a diagnosis. The program calculates the severity of thousands of genetic variants, based on peer-reviewed genetic articles, and correlates the relevant variants with the patient’s signs and symptoms. The result is a differential diagnosis ranked by the likelihood that each disease is the culprit.

IT Infrastructure/HPC: Schrodinger (Read News Story)

(Nominated by Cycle Computing) The Cloud’s the Limit: Rentable Supercomputers for Improving Drug Discovery

Schrodinger and Cycle Computing tested Glide’s docking algorithms by screening a staggering 21 million small molecule ligands against a protein target on a 50,000 core cloud-based supercomputer on the Amazon cloud. Cycle Computing provided Schrodinger with the computational power their program required in three hours.

Editors’ Prize: GeneInsight (Read News Story)

Partners Healthcare Center for Personalized Genetic Medicine (PCPGM) in Boston has been using GeneInsight for over eight years and has generated 30,000 reports. The platform consists of a clinician-facing application that can be integrated with electronic health records or stand alone, and a laboratory-focused application that manages knowledge, and facilitates reporting.

Judges’ Prize: Genentech (Read News Story)

A recent innovation in Genentech’s mouse cage changing procedure showcased the savings that can be achieved when waste is tackled aggressively, The system saved Genentech a staggering $411,000 a year.

Honorable Mention:

JBI and Amgen (Read News Story)

(Nominated by TeselaGen Biotechnology)

Immune Tolerance Network (Read News Story)

(Nominated by LabKey Software)