BIOTECHNICA 2015 Goes Digital

BIOTECHNICA took place in Hanover from 6 to 8 October in combination with the laboratory exhibition LABVOLUTION. The two trade fairs’ contents and concept were tailored to the mega trends of digitisation and biologisation in the run-up to the event. BIO Deutschland, which has had a Working Group on Bio IT and Big Data for just over a year, organised a one-and-a-half day event on bio IT and big data for one of the trade fair forums. This forum took place in the BIOTECHNICA plaza and kicked off with a session on personalised medicine and e-health, featuring a keynote speech by Amin Rostami, CSO of BIO Deutschland member Certara, who described the advantages of computer-aided simulations and evaluations for precision medicine. Next up were presentations by Metabolomics Discovery on its b2c platform Kenkodo, by SAP on the digitisation of the health sector and by MyCartis on biomarker analysis software. Data exchange and integration were the topics of the first session the following day. This session included a presentation by Infoteam Software AG, which represents Germany in the international SiLA consortium. SiLA defines protocols and interfaces aimed at facilitating the simple exchange of data between all laboratory equipment.

The forum’s afternoon session focused on next-generation sequencing (NGS) informatics, with presentations by three BIO Deutschland members, QIAGEN, GATC and CeGaT, on their NGS pipelines, data banks and analysis tools. The presentations showed that NGS, rapid data transfer and low costs per analysis are paving the way to genuinely personalised medicine. As an overlapping topic, digitisation fit in well with the two other forum topics of personalised medicine and the bioeconomy.

BIO Deutschland also organised a stand at the BIOTECHNICA plaza to provide trade fair visitors with information on the sector and the association network. Many BIO Deutschland members took the opportunity to visit the stand, where speakers were also able to continue their discussion with members of the audience after their presentations.

During BIOTECHNICA Night, the trade fair’s official opening event, Werner Eberhardt, global Head of Development for the Healthcare and Life Sciences Platform at SAP, gave an impressive talk in which he illustrated the potential offered by the German IT flagship’s platforms and the direct benefits they offer to doctors, and thus ultimately to patients.

Overall, Deutsche Messe was pleased with the progress of BIOTECHNICA and LABVOLUTION. Around 10,000 trade visitors attended this year’s exhibition.