Innovation and SME Forum

From treatment to prevention: challenges in data management and analysis
Biomedical research has traditionally focused on disease diagnosis and treatment. With the recent surge of data from healthy citizens or from patients in the post-treatment phase, the new horizon in healthcare lies in better detecting signs of disease onset or in avoiding long-term relapses with the ultimate goal of preventing both.

[BC]² will host a one-day ELIXIR Innovation and SME Forum entitled “Building the learning ecosystem of health: from data tracking to preventive medicine” on 13 September. The aim of the day is to foster knowledge sharing and collaborations between academia and industry around the technologies, data science and learnings’ implementation associated with preventive medicine and treatment follow-up.

The Programme Committee has put together a diverse schedule with talks from high-profile speakers, interactive panel discussions, and selected talks from across the biomedical research and healthcare ecosystem. The aim of the day will be to explore solutions to better understand the different components of the learning ecosystem of health and preventive medicine, from technologies to track data and data management, to data integration, analysis and translation into preventive guidelines and healthcare measures.

Serena Scollen

ELIXIR, UK
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After her PhD at the University of Cambridge (UK), Serena Scollen performed her postdoctoral training at University of Cambridge (UK) and the Imperial College in London (UK). From 2010 to 2016, she has been Head of Genetics at Pfizer. In 2016, she became Head of the Human Genomics and Translational Data section of ELIXIR.

As part of her responsibilities in this position, she coordinates the Beyond 1 Million Genomes (B1MG) project, an initiative of 23 European countries aiming to create a network of genetic and clinical data across Europe. Access to people’s genetic and clinical data is key in personalising medicine, helping clinicians to detect diseases earlier, predict their development and to decide on the best possible treatments.

Bogi Eliasen

Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies, Denmark
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Bogi Eliasen holds a Master Degree in Political Science and International Law from the University of Aarhus (Denmark). He has worked as a consultant for politicians, the public sector and private companies and is co-founder and manager of the FarGen - Faroe Genome Project –  a national project planning on sequencing the genome of all the Faroese people with the aim to develop a platform for genetic research of the Faroese population.

Since 2020, Bogi Eliasen is Director of Health at the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies. At the ELIXIR Forum, he will present and discuss several ideas and visions on how health systems have to change and adapt to the increasing  amount of available data in the future.

Nicolas Loeillot

Groupe Mutuel, CH
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Nicolas Loeillot is in expert in computer vision and AI with strong experiences in the private sector. He has worked for many years in Japan before joining the Swiss health insurer Groupe Mutuel in 2018 as Chief Innovation Officer to setup an innovation strategy, accelerate deployments of A.I. and craft a data-driven, health prevention-focused future of the company.

He cofounded 3 innovation programs in collaboration with EPFL Innovation Park:

• Tech4Eva: the first FemTech innovation accelerator in continental Europe.
• Tech4Trust: the first accelerator of cybersecurity in Switzerland, now transitioned to the Vaud Canton.
• Tech4Growth: an executive program to boost collaboration and exchanges between start-up founders, corporate executives, university professors and senior scientists.

In 2021 he joined InnoSuisse as Expert for a 4-year mandate and unveiled Michi Health Predictive, a company focused at solving the problem of discreet diseases with insurer data and data science.

Schedule

Connecting the different layers and components of the learning ecosystem of health is one of the key challenges toward preventive medicine. Several start-ups and SMEs have been selected to present their solutions to overcome this challenge.

• Integrating relevant phenotype and genomic data in EHR with SNOMED CT, LOINC and other Genomic Standards
  BITAC, Spain
  
  There is an urgent need to unify standards within the genomic context, to enable accurate data-driven care medicine. The use of AI algorithms tools that allow the normalization of clinical and genomic data with global and genomic standards facilitates the integration of relevant data coming from different sources in EHR.
  #Health data tracking   #Data integration   #Data management
  
  
• Pill Protect: an innovative and integrated tool for the benefit of patients
  Gene Predictis, Switzerland
  
  Pill Protect is an innovative tool that answers a need in the gynaecology field to identify the patients at risk of adverse effects upon contraceptive pill use. This tool integrates genetic and clinical data to determine the risk of developing venous thrombosis and provides a way to choose the most optimal contraceptive method for each woman. Pill Protect has been on the Swiss market for several years and is CE-IVD marked.
  #Diagnosis   #Data analysis   #Medical prevention
  
  
• Bringing the world’s health knowledge to research and medical decision makers.
  HealthECCO, Germany
  
  HealthECCO is building an open-source platform to combine heterogeneous, unstructured data sources and activate hidden knowledge through connections in the datasets. Our solution integrates and enrichs data from biomedical experiments, publications, patents, clinical trials and electronic health records allowing policy makers, health workers and researchers to easily access and communicate using the same underlying data sources.
  #Data integration   #Data analysis   #Guidelines development
  
  
• MyPharmaGenes: Pharmacogenetics in clinical practice
  HeartGenetics, Genetics and Biotechnology SA, Portugal
  
  Why does treatment for a certain disease work very well for one patient, but poorly or not at all for another patient?Pharmacogenetics research demonstrates that an individual's genetics can significantly affect the safety and efficacy of a drug.
  In order to provide an assertive and scientifically sound solution to health professionals and patients, we have developed MyPharmaGenes® PGx. This new solution provides information on the gene-drug interaction in the fields of Psychiatry, Pain Management, Oncology, Diabetes, Cardiovascular.
  #Data integration   #Translation to healthcare   #Medical prevention
   
• NFL/NBA 2020-2021 Sports Season COVID-19 Monitoring 

  IQVIA, United Kingdom
  
  IQVIA have developed a global network of data partners who are willing to make their data available to researchers to further scientific discoveries and improve patient outcomes. The type of data available by institution, healthcare system or biobank differs and we have access to hundreds of thousands of patients via this network. We will highlight a few ways we use data to accelerate healthcare, and a recent example of a safe back-to-sports program in the midst of the global pandemic.
  #Prevention   #Diagnosis   #Treatment
  

• Curation and integration of single-cell RNA-Seq data for cross-study analysis and interpretation
  Nebion AG, Switzerland
  
  GENEVESTIGATOR® is a high-performance knowledge-base, analysis and visualization tool for gene expression data. The recent exponential increase of publicly available single-cell RNA-Seq studies and the power of this technology for de novo discoveries prompted us to build a manually curated and globally normalized single-cell RNA-Seq compendium. Here, we present an example analysis in GENEVESTIGATOR® for identifying cell-type specific responses to COVID-19 using a published 10x single-cell RNA-Seq study.
  #Diagnosis   #Data analysis   #Medical prevention
  
  
• Hematocrit self-testing for Polycytaemia vera patients at home - A collaboration of physicians, device manufacturer Nova Biomedical and Novartis
  Novartis, Switzerland
  
  Empowering patients with blood disorders to self-test their blood values at home might have implications for the patient’s QoL, possibility of fewer medical visits for HCT control, minimize loss of patients working days, and mainly improvement in disease management with more precision in the treatment. In our project, we envision to introduce a simple device for regular home-based hematocrit and hemoglobin measurements for patients with hematological disorders. We therefore evaluated the accuracy and user-friendliness of a hand-held device that measures those parameters, in a collaboration between health care professionals, Nova Biomedical and Novartis.
  #Treatment follow-up   #Feedback on treatment   #Health data tracking

ELIXIR unites Europe’s leading life science organizations in managing and safeguarding the increasing volume of data being generated by research. It coordinates, integrates and sustains bioinformatics resources across its member states and enables users in academia and industry to access services that are vital for their research.

In each country, so called ELIXIR Nodes run the resources and services that are part of ELIXIR. The Swiss node is coordinated by SIB. As part of its efforts to connect researchers from academia, industry and healthcare in Europe, SIB has decided to organise one of the ELIXIR Innovation and SME Forums at the 2021 of the [BC]² Basel Computational Biology Conference.

As a provider of various renowned bioinformatics resources, expertise and teaching activities to the international life science community, SIB also interacts with ELIXIR at several levels:

• Two of SIB’s supported bioinformatics resources are part of ELIXIR’s Core Data Resources: UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot and STRING (read more)
• A study by SIB and supported by ELIXIR compared existing funding models towards sustainable funding of core data resources in the life sciences (Gabella C et al. F1000Research 2017, 6(ELIXIR):2051 - read more and watch the interview)
• SIB co-led the development of the governance and processes supporting the identification and evaluation of ELIXIR Core Data Resources (Durinx C et al., F1000Research 2016, 5:2422)
• SIB co-leads the ELIXIR Data and Training Platforms and is involved in several other work streams, such as the benchmarking of software tools