New Products Win Praise at 2024 Bio-IT World Best of Show Awards
By Bio-IT World Staff
April 16, 2024 | Bio-IT World announced six Best of Show winners today at the 2024 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston. Honored new products came from winning companies including Combinatics, Osprey, Maxis.IT, Nurocore, Velsera, and Xybion.
The Best of Show Awards Program at Bio-IT World recognizes innovative new product solutions to important problems facing the Life Sciences industry. The awards program is open to any Bio-IT World exhibitor with a new product updated or released in the past year. The People’s Choice Award is voted on by the onsite Bio-IT World community. The other awards are chosen by a panel of judges who screen all of the entries and choose a list of finalists to view during the event.
This year’s winners represent the breadth of solutions developed within the Bio-IT World community, serving as solutions for clinical trial planning, genomics, regulatory compliance, cell biology, and more.
2024 Bio-IT World Best of Show Winners
Here is the full list winners, in alphabetical order, with the companies’ own descriptions of their innovative technologies.
Combinatics | CellKb version 2.7
The web-based interface of CellKb is fast and accurate, requires only a gene list as input, and typically annotates a gene list within one second. Our proprietary search method allows users to specify cell type signatures from thousands of publications as reference. It then compares the query gene list with every gene signature from every publication, without aggregating, or using a prediction model, to provide a matching cell type. The search result gives a link to the source publication of each matching gene signature, along with cell type/disease/tissue and experimental conditions. This allows scientists to check the reference publications of the matching cell types for additional verification. We provide a comprehensive and deeply annotated resource of cell type marker genes with a fast web-based interface that can be easily used by scientists without requiring any coding or installation. Customers can also integrate CellKb into their single cell data processing pipelines using a REST API. CellKb is regularly updated with data from the latest publications which is released every 4 months.
MaxisIT Inc | SMART Optimizer and v1.0
By anchoring AI in causality and harnessing the power of Causal AI, we are shifting AI towards general, more human-like intelligence, thus enabling superior decision-making in pharmaceutical and life sciences clinical trials. Machine learning models and LLMs base their response on identifying relationships and patterns. They don’t yet have human level causal reasoning. Unfortunately, they are not perfect and have shortcomings such as explainability, safety, and hallucination (both intrinsic and extrinsic). At MaxisIT, we are attempting to address hallucination by adding an abstraction layer based on retrieval augmented generation and multi-agent architecture, which sifts through an enterprise’s data to improve the quality of the response. And we are building explainability by including human intelligence in the causal discovery. LLMs have made a noteworthy impact on the broader field of artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, they exhibit certain limitations when employed independently for enterprise decision-making due to issues related to consistency, transparency, and a deeper comprehension of causal relationships within data. Causal AI within SMART Optimizer, by contrast, inherently offers a transparent framework for revealing these cause-and-effect relationships, building causal models, and offering actionable recommendations that decision makers can trust. SMART Optimizer supports the ladder of Causation across three stages of sophistication in understanding and thinking: association, intervention, and counterfactuals. Intervention requires causal relationships and counterfactuals require imagining and reasoning about hypotheticals and “what if” questions.
Nurocor, Inc. | Nurocor Clinical Platforom v9.0
Biopharma Companies are moving toward full automation and harmonization of business processes across the clinical development lifecycle, beginning with digitalized protocol. Keeping pace with this shift in the marketplace, the Nurocor Clinical Platform revolutionizes clinical development with an innovative digital protocol solution. This digital automation is leading to clear efficiencies and accelerating trial lifecycles by 50% or more. Once traditional documents (protocol, SAP, CSR) are in a fine-grained and semantically specified digital form, the content becomes actionable. TransCelerate Biopharma refers to this digitalization process as “breaking the document paradigm”. What this means is: 1) content originally “locked up” in a document can be actively shared and reused; and 2) processes can be redesigned and automated to take full advantage of the power of digitalization. The Nurocor Lean ProtocolTMprocess coupled with NCP technology enables our customers to utilize digital content in a digital gated workflow process to trigger many study startup processes to run in parallel. In digital form, sections of a protocol can be locked based on the maturity level of that section. Mature and locked sections of content can drive a gated workflow process to trigger downstream processes such as EDC build and Specimen Management. TransCelerate formalized the DDF Program in 2021, establishing an important foundation for automated dynamic readiness to transform drug development. Nurocor is one of the only vendors to receive distinguished invitations to participate in every DDF Hackathon and Connectathonbetween 2020-2023. Each time we successfully demonstrated real-world use cases and achieved DDF Program goals.
Osprey Life Sciences | DQA - Digital Quality Analyst v1
https://ospreylifesciences.com/digital-quality-analyst/
Digital Quality Analyst (DQA) introduces a new era of document compliance management by combining the agility and power of artificial intelligence, the reliability of enterprise strength systems with a built-in commitment to process-driven workflows. DQA meets the evolving needs of life sciences organizations, offering a seamless blend of AI-powered analysis and remediation capabilities with a simple to use, intuitive user experience. What sets DQA apart is its customizable nature and multiple engine architecture. Allowing users to fine-tune settings to perfectly align with their organization's compliance requirements while simultaneously allowing DQA to regularly introduce new capabilities. This level of adaptability, combined with a foundation built on secure, enterprise-grade technology, ensures that DQA is not only a tool for today but a scalable solution, ready to meet future document compliance challenges and integrate evolving technologies. As companies navigate the complexities of maintaining compliance in a rapidly changing regulatory landscape, DQA stands as a model of innovation, efficiency, and security.
Velsera, Inc. | Pangenotyper
Pangenotyper is the first commercial-grade workflow combining pangenome aware read mapping and variant calling. We have demonstrated significantly superior accuracy (precision and recall) on standard Genome-In-A-Bottle benchmarks assessing variant call accuracy for SNPs, InDels and SVs over the whole genome. Pangenotyper also shows superior results with challenging Medically Relevant Genomic Regions, when benchmarked versus major secondary analysis workflows, including Sentieon and Velsera’s previous solutions. We have shown two contributing factors for the increased accuracy: - GRAF aligner maps reads with higher confidence and fewer mismatches by assessing the haplotypes implicit in the pangenome as likely generators. - DNAscopevariant caller identifies short variants in complex genomic regions more accurately than GATK, GRAF variant caller or DeepVariant using a machine learned model that discriminates sequencing artefacts and sample contamination from true genomic mutations. A notable aspect of the technology underpinning this workflow is that the constituent tools have been developed with computational efficiency as a key consideration, resulting in the most cost-effective pangenome-aware secondary analysis workflow available for commodity hardware. The use of standard formats, user-friendly interfaces, and hosted & on-prem deployment modes make Pangenotyper a drop-in replacement for current secondary workflows, enabling pharmaceutical companies and clinical research institutions to adopt this without the need to rebuild their bioinformatics infrastructure. This makes pangenomes accessible to a wider audience. Pangenotyperrepresents a step-change in secondary analysis, facilitating more effective drug targeting and personalized medicine approaches. Velsera is offering at-cost validation projects with interested parties to re-analyze existing cohorts of NGS data.
People’s Choice Award: Xybion | Compliance Risk Predictor
https://www.xybion.com/quality-management-system/compliance-risk-predictor/
Some of the business process issues solved: Batch manufacturing record review: It takes a lot of time and effort to review batch records. Manufacturing personnel need to find and record deviations, and manually reconcile information before a production batch is released. At times, the information comes from various electronic systems as well as manually created documents to make the process even harder. The entire review can be automated to fast track the batch release process that can reduce manufacturing inventory. Document Quality Review: over 30% FDA citations are related to documentation. Several hundred SOPs, work instructions, policy documents, training records, project documents are manually reviewed and audited to ensure GxP compliance. CompliancePredictor™ monitors documents in real-time and predicts non-conformance issues. This helps organizations “always audit-ready”. Third Party Audit and Risk Management: It’s a daunting task to audit suppliers, know current compliance status, understand business risks, and maintain supplier quality scorecards. Most companies carry a backlog of pending supplier audits due to bandwidth challenges. Xybion’s solution helps companies standardize, digitize, and automate audits to significantly increase productivity. A view of Benchmark data (diagram) In summary We predict that life sciences organizations can improve their compliance productivity by about 60% across the value chain. - Companies will reduce the number of FDA citations - Companies can reduce the number of non-conformances by finding the issues early in the process - Companies can improve overall quality of output - Company supplier network will be more compliant - Overall audit time will be significantly reduced And, people will not be stressed out about any regulatory audits as they will always be ready and have the predicted outcome well in advance.