Nanome is among 2018 winners of Bio-IT World’s Best of Show Awards for NanoPro (pictured)
Nanome is among 2018 winners of Bio-IT World’s Best of Show Awards for NanoPro (pictured)

Seven companies were honored today for their development of new products deemed to demonstrate “exceptional” innovation in life-sci technologies.

The seven are the 2018 winners of Bio-IT World’s Best of Show Awards, announced at the 17th Annual Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, being held through today in Boston. The winners emerged from a field of 46 new products submitted for consideration of which judges viewed presentations from 18 finalists.

Winners were named in six categories this year: Data Integration & Management; Analysis & Data Computing; Genomic Data Services; Data Visualization & Exploration; Storage Infrastructure & Hardware; and the Judges’ Prize. Conference attendees also voted on the People’s Choice Award, designed to recognize products that they believe enable better research by measurably improving workflow or capacity.

Winners of the 2018 Bio-IT World Best of Show awards:

   • The Hyve (Utrecht, the Netherlands) won the Data Integration and Management Award for RADAR-base, an open source platform designed to securely collect, store and share readings from wearable devices and smartphone sensors to enable remote monitoring. RADAR-base consists of three major categories of components: Data ingestion, data storage and management, and data sharing.

   • Sinequa (Paris) won the Analysis and Data Computing Award for Sinequa ES v10, based on the Sinequa Cognitive Search and Analytics platform. The platform is designed to handle all structured and unstructured data sources and uses Natural Language Processing, statistical analysis and Machine Learning, in order to create an enriched “Logical Data Warehouse” (LDW) that is optimized for performance in delivering rapid responses to users' information needs.

   • Diploid (Leuven, Belgium) won the Genomic Data Services Award for Moon, which according to the company is the first software to autonomously diagnose rare diseases from whole-exome sequencing and whole-genome sequencing data. Moon applies AI to the domain of rare disease diagnostics, going from whole genome variant data to pinpointing the causal variant in less than 5 minutes.

   • Nanome (San Diego, CA) won the Data Visualization and Exploration Award for NanoPro, a nano-engineering design tool designed to facilitate drug development by allowing biopharma users to discover new pharmaceutical compounds and visualize proteins and viruses in virtual reality. An offshoot, NanoPro: Data Science, was designed for Solvay to allow its researchers to walk through three-dimensional data sets. .

   • PetaGene (Cambridge, UK) won the Storage Infrastructure and Hardware Award for PetaSuite Cloud Edition, Version 1.2. It combines the ability for a user’s software tools and pipelines to seamlessly integrate with a wide variety of cloud platforms without modification, as well as significantly improved, high-performance, scalable PetaSuite genomic compression technology.

   • Linguamatics (Cambridge, UK, and Marlborough, MA) won the Judge’s Prize for iScite 2.0 , a Software-as-a-Service search application to designed to let researchers extract and analyze relevant data to rapidly answer business-critical questions. iScite uses Linguamatics’ award-winning Natural Language Processing (NLP) and includes Linguamatics’ cloud-hosted content among its data sources. MEDLINE, Clinical Trials.gov, FDA Drug Labels, PubMed Central, and Patent Abstracts are annotated with curated terminologies for diseases, drugs, genes and organizations.

   • OnRamp Bioinformatics (San Diego, CA) won the People’s Choice Award for ROSALIND, which the company says is the first-ever genomics analysis platform specifically designed for life science researchers to analyze and interpret datasets, while freeing up more time for bioinformaticians.

   ROSALIND aims to simplify the practice of genomic data interpretation—and is named for Rosalind Franklin, Ph.D. (1920-1958), who made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal and graphite. Dr. Franklin is the namesake of the Rosalind Franklin Society, established to recognize, encourage, and support women in science, and founded by Mary Ann Liebert, President and CEO of Clinical OMICs publisher Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.

Judges for the 2018 awards included Joe Cerro, BostonCIO; Chris Dwan, Bridgeplate; Richard Holland, New Forest Ventures; Eleanor Howe, Diamond Age Data Science; Phillips Kuhl, Cambridge Healthtech Institute; Steve Marshall, Marshall Data Solutions; Michael Miller, Genentech; Art Morales, Analgesic Solutions; Nanguneri Nirmala, Tufts University School of Medicine; Alexander Sherman, Massachusetts General Hospital; Subi Subramanian, Vertex Pharmaceuticals; Bill Van Etten, BioTeam; and Bio-IT World Editor Allison Proffitt.

“The innovation on display by Bio-IT World exhibitors never disappoints, and we are excited to shine a spotlight on the best life sciences has to offer,” Proffitt said in a statement.

Also of Interest