WASHINGTON, D.C. — June 16, 2010 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the winners of the Microsoft Life Sciences Innovation Awards 2010, which honor pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies that demonstrate new solutions or the successful application of available software and devices to revolutionize medicine, bring therapeutic breakthroughs to market faster, fight serious ailments, improve health and enhance people’s quality of life. This year, companies that demonstrated benefits and metrics as a result of their technology implementation were recognized.
The Microsoft Life Sciences Innovation Awards 2010 were announced in Washington, D.C., at the Drug Information Association’s 46th annual meeting during an evening reception.
“The companies that received awards are on the cutting edge of integrating life sciences and information technology to advance research and benefit patients around the world,” said Michael Naimoli, U.S. life sciences industry solutions director, Microsoft. “By demonstrating quantifiable results, each of the award recipients is not only showing how Microsoft technology can be implemented to revolutionize the industry but also providing a road map for other companies that want to advance their own organizations.”
Award Winners
Submissions for this year’s awards came from global life sciences corporations and research universities specializing in drug discovery, scientific research and basic science, medical devices, clinical trials, document and records management, knowledge management, manufacturing and bioprocessing, mobile workers, supply chain, sales and marketing, digital marketing and social networking, personalized medicine, and infostructure, desktop and application virtualization. The 2010 winners are as follows:
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Emory University with Thermo Fisher Scientific. The Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute (ACTSI) is one of 46 medical research institutes working to enhance translational research in the United States. ACTSI implemented Thermo Scientific Nautilus LIMS at Emory University as part of an enterprise biospecimen management system rollout to enhance workflow, foster collaboration and effectively manage samples. As a result, Emory was able to achieve a level of standardization of its Informatics infrastructure that is easily replicated across the research institutes, giving Emory, ACTSI and the community an informatics platform that facilitates advances in translational science.
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Merck with ProtonMedia Inc. In an effort to conduct virtual scientific and business meetings, Merck partnered with ProtonMedia to develop custom virtual-world meeting technology for employee collaboration, as well as learning and training. Built on ProtonMedia’s ProtoSphere virtual-world platform technology, the pilot at Merck demonstrates that virtual environments for scientific meetings are not only successful but accepted by the current generation of scientists.
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Pfizer Inc. Through the combination of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Office OneNote 2007, Pfizer created shared electronic “project notebooks” that enable teams to work in a rich collaborative environment, resulting in significant time savings, improved decision-making and an increased team cohesion.
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Stanford University Medical Center with NextDocs. To automate its Event Discovery (EDR) process, Stanford deployed NextDocs Document and Quality Management Suite running on Microsoft SharePoint. The automated EDR process includes document review, approval, trending and reporting of all nonconformances to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research and helps ensure compliance with FDA guidelines.
The Microsoft Life Sciences Innovation Awards 2010 winners were selected by an esteemed panel of industry experts:
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Kevin Davies, Ph.D., editor in chief, Bio-IT World
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Benjamin Rooks, founder, ST Advisors LLC
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Salvatore Salamone, executive editor, Ziff Davis Enterprise
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Scott Lundstrom, group vice president, IDC-Health Insights
More information about the Life Sciences Innovation Awards 2010 can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/industry/healthcare/lifesciences/innovation_awards.mspx.
About Microsoft in Health
Microsoft is committed to improving health around the world through software innovation. Over the past 13 years Microsoft has steadily increased its investments in health, with a focus on addressing the challenges of health providers, health and social services organizations, payers, consumers, and life sciences companies worldwide. Microsoft closely collaborates with a broad ecosystem of partners and develops its own powerful health solutions, such as Amalga and HealthVault. Together, Microsoft and its industry partners are working to advance a vision of unifying health information and making it more readily available, ensuring the best quality of life and affordable care for everyone.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
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