Big Data Meets Big Biology in San Diego on March 31: The Agenda

In less than a month, Xconomy is bringing some of the big guns in life sciences together in San Diego to talk about the opportunities that are emerging for tech and software innovation in fields like genomics, biotechnology, and digital health. We can now give you a preview of what it’s going to look like.

There’s no question that big data and big biology are coming together in a big way. The only question is how it’s going to happen.

We’re laying out at least part of that roadmap on March 31 at “Big Data Meets Big Science” at the Illumina Theater at the Alexandria, which is on the Torrey Pines mesa at 10996 Torreyana Road. In genomics, much of the technology roadmap already has been charted by Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]), the San Diego-based maker of next-generation genome sequencing technology, consumables, and genetic analysis tools—and Illumina president Francis deSouza is kicking off our forum.

DeSouza, who will be taking over as Illumina CEO in July, also will talk with venture investors about the bets they are placing on IT innovations in the life sciences. If you’re an entrepreneur, innovator, or investor in the IT sector, you’ll want to be there. I’ve asked other speakers to also highlight the big trends in their respective fields, and to provide examples of the innovation needs they see in high-performance computing, predictive analytics, data storage, and software development.

Examples abound:

—Grail, a San Francisco startup founded earlier this year, is developing diagnostic technology sensitive enough to detect early stage cancer. The nature of the technology challenge, though, became apparent when Grail recently named Jeff Huber—who spent 12 years as the top engineer at Google—as its CEO.

—You don’t need to be a data scientist to innovate in healthcare. Amid a public furor over drug pricing, Santa Monica, CA-based GoodRx and New York’s Blink Health have developed online tools that help consumers get their generic drugs at prices that are far lower than the prices pharmacies typically charge customers who are paying out of pocket instead of through insurance.

—In San Diego, Edico Genome has developed a processor that has been optimized specifically for next-generation genome sequencing machines—reducing the time needed to map a patient’s whole genome from 20 hours to 20 minutes.

Edico Genome is on our agenda. Edico’s founding CEO, Pieter Van Rooyen, will take the stage with one of his principal investors, Lucian Iancovici, a senior investment manager at Qualcomm Life, to discuss how Edico got started.

Nicholas Schork, professor and director of human biology at the J. Craig Venter Institute will provide an overview of the fast-moving trends in genomics, and offer his insights on IT needs. We’ll also hear from Franz Och, an expert in machine learning and language translation, explain why he left a plum job as the head of Google Translate to become the chief data scientist at Human Longevity, a San Diego startup founded by the human genome pioneer J. Craig Venter.

Finally, we have scheduled a series of quick pitches from CureMetrix, Sentrian, Nervana Systems, Applied Proteomics, and ChromaCode to highlight how the local tech community is innovating in life sciences

We’ve posted the agenda for Big Data Meets Big Bio here. Tickets are available at this link. I’m looking forward to this event, and to seeing you at the Alexandria at Torrey Pines on March 31.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.