Press Release March 19, 2025 | Bio-IT World has named the 2025 Innovative Practices Awards winners, choosing to honor four entries. Winners this year include Genmab nominated by Genedata, NHS England nominated by IQVIA, Pistoia Alliance, and Regeneron. The judging panel also highlighted two entries for Honorable Mention: a separate entry from Pistoia Alliance and Quris-AI. All winners will be honored next month at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, April 2-4, in Boston.
The Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Awards have for years highlighted outstanding examples of technology innovation in the life sciences. Judged by a panel of expert, peer judges, the Innovative Practices Awards program recognizes partnerships and projects pushing our industry forward, promoting strategies that can be widely shared and implemented across the industry to improve the quality, pace, and reach of our science.
“In another year of tough competition, these four entries stood out as ones cleverly addressing real problems in the space,” said Allison Proffitt, editorial director at Bio-IT World. “These groups worked hard to understand the problems facing teams and solve them strategically; prioritized patients’ needs; and served as standards-bearers, quantifying how well we measure against our own most noble goals.”
This year’s winners stood out for excellence in data standards, analysis, patient service, and industry advancements. Here are the winners with their own project summaries:
Lighthouse Award: Pistoia Alliance for “FAIR Maturity Matrix”
The Pistoia Alliance has achieved an industry first with the creation of its FAIR Maturity Matrix—an easy-to-use self-assessment tool that measures organizational leadership and technical maturity. Over 20 industry experts collaborated to create the tool, successfully simplifying and standardizing the many complex processes involved in FAIR data implementation. The Maturity Matrix is designed to help organizations benchmark and maximize their investment in FAIR, whatever their level of maturity – from those getting started with their FAIR journey to those looking to understand how to move to the next level. It is being adopted by national research and funding organizations, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies of all sizes, consultancies and technology providers. Ultimately, it will help the industry to unlock data siloes, successfully adopt emerging technologies to power data-led decisions, and work together to reduce the time and cost of bringing new therapies to market to meet unmet patient needs.Lighthouse Award: Pistoia Alliance for “FAIR Maturity Matrix”
Knowledge Management Award: Genmab (nominated by Genedata) for “Accelerating chromatography workflows by redesigning and harmonizing data processing and reporting”
Chromatography is the workhorse for analytical assessment and purification of biotherapeutics at biopharma companies worldwide. Data from chromatography workflows are growing exponentially, making it increasingly onerous for biopharma developability groups using different instrumentation to capture and process data, collaborate, assess results, and ensure consistent and reliable outcomes. The results, in part, are error-prone processes, poor scalability, incomparable data, and resources in people, time, and money ill-spent. To address these challenges, Genedata and Genmab developed—Chromatics—a central, integrated software platform for analyzing and managing chromatography data, which enables rapid assessment by project teams globally. The digitalized hardware-agnostic solution eliminates manual processes, automates and harmonizes data processing, provides well-annotated data for AI/ML initiatives, and effectively accelerates the development of biomolecules.
Respect the Patient Award: NHS England (nominated by IQVIA) for “NHS Privacy Enhancing Technology”
Over the next decade, the UK National Health Service (NHS) is moving towards a data-enabled ecosystem with a connected, consistent data architecture. This will put patient data to work to optimize national insights and enable improved healthcare. A key challenge is ensuring compliance, including data auditability and protection, whilst optimizing data usability for crucial insights. The NHS-PET (Privacy Enhancing Technology) is a configurable platform powered by IQVIA Privacy Analytics which provides a secure, scalable solution for the auditing and privacy treatment of patient data within NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP). Benefits realized from PET include cutting waiting times and offering new virtual services. For example, hospital trusts using FDP with integrated PET have treated on average 114 more inpatients in theatres every month since platform introduction. Implementing this vision of shared digital infrastructure across NHSE can benefit care provision across over 500 acute, specialist or community hospitals.
Informatics Award: Regeneron for Unified Namespace for Preclinical Manufacturing and Process Development: an Industry 4.0 digitalization platform for realtime automated decision-making
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is a science-driven organization committed to discovering and developing new medicines for patients with serious diseases. Like others in the biotechnology space, we face the challenges of orchestrating the systems, applications, and integrations that power our laboratory instrumentation and plant equipment. Historically, harmonizing resources to serve our scientists’ needs has required ongoing manual intervention and expertise across multiple disparate systems. Recently, our scientists and technologists partnered to address these challenges—keeping in mind priorities around compliance, cybersecurity, and scalability—and created a new platform: the Unified Name Space (UNS). The UNS seamlessly connects system integrations, automates interactions, and connects applications to make data available, irrespective of the source. With the UNS in place, we’re able to provide a common platform for organizing a complete view of lab-scale and pilot-scale bioreactors and their related instrumentation to provide operators the information needed for decision-making.
Ones to Watch
The judging panel also chose to highlight two entries with Honorable Mention designations, emphasizing the promise and potential of these projects. These two efforts are ones the judges will be eagerly watching in the year to come and look forward to hearing updates from again in 2026.
Honorable Mention: Pistoia Alliance for “In Vitro Pharmacology (IVP)”
In vitro assays are crucial for assessing the safety and efficacy of active substances, metabolites, and impurities in Investigational New Drug (IND) and New Drug Application (NDA) submissions. However, inconsistent data standards for in vitro pharmacology (IVP) have hindered efficient in vitro testing and regulatory review. The Pistoia Alliance has addressed this issue through a public private partnership with regulators at the FDA, working collaboratively with biopharmaceutical industry stakeholders including Abbvie, Novartis, Roche, Pfizer, Amgen, Eurofins, Zifo, Scibite, L’Hasa Limited, and Curl Research. Efforts have standardized the way in which in vitro results are submitted using defined ontology and processes and using FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles to ensure data is consistent, human and machine-readable, and easily reused for multiple regulatory submissions. Development of a repository of assays, linked to result templates, improves data transparency and enhances analysis capacity, improving efficiency, compliance and safety while accelerating drug development.
Honorable Mention: Quris-AI for “BioAI—De-risking, accelerating, and personalizing drug development”
A leader in AI-driven drug safety, Quris-AI’s patented Bio-AI approach integrates AI, patient-on-chip biology, real-time sensing, and genetically diverse stem-cell-derived tissue. Its automated platform generates and collects data on millions of interactions between known drugs and organs on a chip and then uses this data to train its advanced AI platform. This technology solves the core clinical prediction challenge – predicting, before expensive clinical trials, which drug candidates will work safely and efficaciously in the human body to focus resources, time, and budget on the drugs with the most potential. In a blinded, joint study with top-pharma partners, Quris’ Bio-AI approach outperformed existing safety prediction approaches, while reducing costs by 90%. All six projects will accept their awards during the plenary session at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo on Friday, April 4 at 8:05am. They will also all each present the details of their winning entries during a dedicated Innovative Practices Awards Session beginning at 10:40am on Friday, April 4, in the Data Management track.