The Bio-IT World Conference & Expo 2019 was held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA from April 16th to 18th. Since its inception in 2002, this conference has established a solid reputation as a cross-disciplinary event for IT technology and biomedical research, and attracts over 3,000 industry experts from more than 40 countries around the world each year, including those involved in biotechnology, pharmaceutical innovation, clinical research, IT technology and other fields.

At this year’s conference, the “Innovative Practices Awards Winners” were announced for the first time, to recognize and reward projects and products that have made outstanding contributions and have unique impact in the field. The editor-in-chief of Bio-IT World stated, “These awards aim to recognize the spirit of dedication and innovation in the life sciences field, and the selected winners will highlight the inspiring work we do in our industry.”

After multiple rounds of recommendations and selections, Sentieon, Abbvie, and Novo Nordisk were jointly awarded this honor.

In the award citation for Sentieon, the Bio-IT judging committee wrote:

To aid the genomics industry without adding “yet another variant caller,” Sentieon identified BWA/GATK as high-quality tools because of the rigor of their mathematical models and resulting accuracy. Sentieon has improved on this foundation using redesigned computational algorithms with high efficiency, better usability, and 100% consistency. Sentieon’s software package realizes the same math as in BWA-MEM, GATK, MuTect, MuTect2 based pipelines, while using 3-10x fewer core hours, lower memory requirements, and achieving 100% consistency by removing downsampling and thread dependency. Sentieon software automatically scales to efficiently use all available CPU cores. Further, improved computational algorithms enable Sentieon software to joint-call large cohorts of tens of thousands of genomes without intermediate steps.

Prior to this Bio-IT award, Sentieon’s software had won the PrecisionFDA Consistency Challenge, Truth Challenge, and Warm-up Challenge, as well as the ICGC-TCGA DREAM Challenge. Currently, Sentieon’s products are widely used in scientific research, clinical applications, drug development, agricultural breeding, and other fields around the world, having undergone rigorous testing with hundreds of customers and over a million samples.

The original award announcement can be found here: http://www.bio-itworld.com/2019/04/18/bio-it-world-announces-inaugural-innovative-practices-awards-winners.aspx