Recorded on April 2, 2015

Sponsored by

Learning Objectives:

• Technical challenges and solutions of analyzing a growing amount of data in NGS testing
• CLIA validation arising in the operation of large scale NGS CLIA testing services
• Trends and challenges in life sciences working with high throughput instruments
• Latest technology advancements relative to compute, I/O and storage, which can directly accelerate scientific discovery and translate results into clinical practice

Dr. Stanley Letovsky, Ph.D.

Associate Vice-President for Clinical Informatics

LabCorp.

Dr. Letovsky leads a team responsible for implementing the analytical methods for LabCorp’s rapidly growing suite of next generation sequencing tests, which currently includes cardiovascular risk panels, somatic tumor analysis, noninvasive prenatal testing, breast cancer risk, and exome sequencing.

Previously he has led the informatics organizations at SynapDx, Helicos Biosciences, Codon Devices, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Monsanto, and the Genome Database at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes. He is also an adjunct professor of bioinformatics at Boston University.

Session:
Dr. Letovsky will discuss issues of computational scalability, software evolution and CLIA validation arising in the operation of large scale NGS CLIA testing services. Dr. Letovsky will also discuss how LabCorp plan to scale up production workloads following the transition of NGS tests into the clinical scope.

Mikael Flensborg, M.S.

Director Global Partner Relations and Product Management of CLC Server Solutions

CLC bio, a Qiagen Company

Mikael Flensborg manages Technology Partnerships for Qiagen Bioinformatics and management of the CLC bio Server Solutions for large scale software analysis of next generation sequencing data.

Session:Mikael Flensborg will discuss the technical challenges and solutions of analysing a growing amount of data in NGS testing, hereunder a technical overview of CLC bio Server Software with focus on scalability, user experiences, flexibility and productivity in a high performance computing environment.

Kristina Kermanshahche

Chief Architect, Health & Life Sciences

Intel Corporation

Kristina Kermanshahche is Chief Architect of Health & Life Sciences at Intel Corporation. Her focus area is Big Data/Analytics in Health & Life Sciences, helping to drive transformation at the intersect of Next-Gen Sequencing (NGS), high performance computing (HPC), and healthcare informatics. She works closely with customers and ecosystem partners to optimize high throughput sequencing and analytics, overcome systemic challenges faced by the industry, and deliver solutions which accelerate adoption of precision medicine worldwide. Her twenty-five year career in software development spans nearly every industry, with an emphasis on complex distributed systems, parallelism, high availability, networking, and data analytics. She received her B.A. degree in 1986 from the Robert D. Clarke Honors College, University of Oregon, in Political Science and International Studies, magna cum laude.

Session:
Kristina Kermanshahche will discuss trends and challenges in life sciences working with high throughput instruments, considerations for research and clinical operations alike, pursuing pipeline optimizations for high throughput (many samples) or low latency (single sample) analysis. She will cover some of the latest technology enhancements relative to compute, I/O and storage which can directly accelerate scientific discovery and translate results into clinical practice.