Bio-IT World's fifth annual conference is just three weeks away! In addition to outstanding keynotes, conference tracks, and networking opportunities (see www.lifesciencesexpo.com for full event details), this year's event features 10 diverse and exciting educational workshops, covering a range of topics from social networking and informatics education to text mining and life science litigation issues.
A complete listing of the 2006 workshop program follows: by signing up for a Gold (one-day) Pass, you'll gain access to any of the workshops on that particular day. Alternatively, a Platinum Pass provides access to all conference and workshop programs over the full three days of the event.
***JUST ANNOUNCED!!!
This April marks the third anniversary of the completion of the Human Genome Project. This introductory tutorial covers the skills and topics needed to effectively use the UCSC Genome Browser (sometimes known as the "Golden Path") – a powerful, free, publicly-accessible tool, including: basic functionality of Genome Browser searching and BLAST use, Table Browser use, creating and using Custom Tracks, and an introduction to the Gene Sorter.
Organized by the UCSC Bioinformatics group and presented by OpenHelix.
Speaker: Mary E. Mangan
This timely workshop explores the web's next wave and what it means for science, with discussion and demonstrations of blogs, wikis, social bookmarking services, mashups, and more. These advances bring scientists closer to fulfilling the web's potential as a global communication medium. There will be a special announcement of a social science network of particular interest to researchers in the Boston area.
Speakers: Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media); Declan Butler (Nature magazine), and Jim Ostell (NCBI, NIH).
The post-genome era brings about new opportunities and challenges in research and data analysis, one that places a premium on multi-disciplinary approaches including biology, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, engineering etc. This workshop will explore new trends in the teaching of life science informatics and the training of the next generation of biomedical and bio-IT students. Topics will include workforce development, new and incumbent worker training demand; educating towards the convergence of bio and clinical informatics; and the use and deployment of new user tools.
Speakers: Eric Silfen (Columbia University Dept Biomedical Informatics); Patricia Dombrowski (Bellevue Community College, Seattle); Don Rule (Microsoft); and Margaret Schulte (VP, Education, HIMSS)
SPONSORED BY LINGUAMATICS
The explosion in both published and internal information presents a real challenge to most pharmaceutical companies. Around 80% of this information is in the form of unstructured text, and Medline contains over 12 million abstracts. Traditional search-based methods are unable to find relevant information in the required timescales, and often unable to find it at all. This workshop will present the current state of text mining and its application to solving information and real business problems in pharma-biotech, including discovery, safety, clinical, and business intelligence.
Speakers: David Milward (CTO, Linguamatics)
Life sciences organizations are under pressure to improve their pipelines, develop more drugs, and bring new products to market faster. There are many approaches to improving R&D; productivity that focus on collaboration. The challenge is to make better use of insights and expertise and leverage organizational experience and wisdom. Strategies include the creation of standard vocabularies so that the organization is consistent in how it communicates and people can find information—an enterprise taxonomy. This workshop will show how consistent taxonomies can be applied to search, information navigation, content management, knowledge management, portal development, and overall integration programs.
Speaker: Seth Earley (Earley & Associates)
SPONSORED BY HP
How can life sciences organizations manage up to a PB of data, scaling to thousands of Linux cluster processors, and still see three to five times the performance of other storage options? As R&D; and clinical researchers accelerate the growth and integration of medical images into their projects, how can they harness all this image data from disparate management systems across different organizations to speed results and enhance decision-making? This workshop will survey the options and assess the pros and cons of technologies available today to address these storage challenges in life sciences.
Speakers: Kent Koeninger (High Performance Computing Storage Solutions, HP) and Arturo Gamboa-Aldeco (HP Information Lifecycle Management Solutions, HP)
SPONSORED BY IBM
The use of biomarkers in biopharmaceutical R&D; holds the promise of increasing the safety and efficacy of new drugs. It is expected that valid imaging, pharmacogenomic, and other biomarkers will serve as surrogate clinical endpoints in new drug applications to the FDA. This workshop will focus on the integration of biomarker data into information systems supporting the development of targeted treatments for patient populations characterized by shared genotypic and/or phenotypic profiles. The presentations will feature validated use cases, and the demonstration of a realistic solution scenario that includes diverse data types relevant for biomarker data repositories.
Speakers: Joanna Fueyo, Peter Gund, Michael Hehenberger, and
Douglas del Prete (IBM)
Life sciences companies face a disproportionate risk for major litigation. The industry is built on intellectual property, meaning that life science companies frequently are called upon to defend what they own and must be vigilant against those who infringe. Further, the government has stepped up its enforcement of the web of laws that govern these businesses. And life science issuers as a category are now at the highest risk of facing an SEC or class action securities lawsuit. In this workshop, attorneys from the law firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP will explore issues including IP litigation, government regulations, class action, and enforcement risks facing life sciences companies
Speakers: Cynthia D. Vreeland; Karen F. Green, and Jonathan A. Shapiro
(Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, Boston)
Internet-based clinical trials offer convenient, cost-effective solutions for streamlining drug development. But initiating and executing an e-clinical trial program requires reengineering a company's clinical research process. This workshop details how a project is developed from its inception, and how the development teams must now interact. We examine the changing roles of the Sponsor, Clinical Research Site, CRA, Data Manager and Safety Officer, and offer guidance on how to interact throughout the entire development process.
Speakers: Jules Mitchel (Target Health); Imogene Grimes (Regeneron Pharmaceuticals); Mary Gross (Abbott Laboratories); and Robert Miceli (Pfizer)
The movement from the Syntactic to the Semantic Web opens a bold possibility for constructing SOA/Semantic Web informatics platforms for life science research. These new platforms will be based on semantic data modeling standards (RDFS/OWL) and will have the power to address critical life science research problems, including data integration; modeling probabilistic data and schemas; collaboration among distributed research teams; and rapid evolution of analysis/modeling tools. This tutorial will introduce attendees to OWL, the base language for representing information in the Semantic Web.
Speakers: Tom Atwood (CEO Data-Grid); James Hendler (University of Maryland); and Steve Ross-Talbot (Pi4 Technologies/ W3C).
WORKSHOP SCHEDULE:
April 3:
8:00 AM - 10:00 AM
8:00 AM - 10:00 AM
8:00 AM - 10:00 AM
10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
1:30 PM - 3:30 PM
April 4
1:45 PM - 3:45 PM
4:00 PM - 6:30 PM
April 5
10:30 AM - 12:15 PM
1:30 PM - 3:30 PM
1:30 PM - 3:30 PM