PROOF Centre of Excellence and UBC James Hogg iCAPTURE Research Centre Win Bio-IT World Grand Prize Best Practices Award.

Vancouver's life sciences community garnered more international attention with the announcement that the Centre of Excellence for the Prevention of Organ Failure (PROOF Centre) and the UBC James Hogg iCAPTURE Research Centre received the 2010 Bio-IT World Best Practices Award for Personalized & Translational Medicine.

Established in 2003, the Bio-IT World Best Practices Awards recognizes teams across industry and academia for excellence in innovation that lead to improvements in financial and operational capabilities in the life sciences community.

The PROOF Centre, a multi-sectoral, not-for-profit collaborative enterprise hosted by the University of British Columbia, strives to discover, develop, commercialize and implement molecular biomarker solutions for better patient management and therapy along the life cycle of heart, lung and kidney failure from risk through to endstage disease. Home to world leaders in heart, lung and blood vessel disease research based at St. Paul's Hospital, the UBC James Hogg iCAPTURE Research Centre works closely with teams in the PROOF Centre in the biomarker development processes to improve prevention, prediction, diagnosis and treatment of heart, lung and kidney failure.

The Centres were nominated by IO Informatics (Berkeley, CA), whose Sentient software suite is used in the data integration environment. The Gala and Awards Ceremony were held April 22 at the World Trade Center in Boston, Massachusetts, at the Cambridge Healthtech Institute's eighth annual Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. Grand Prize recipients selected in other categories included the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Scripps Research Institute, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Research & Development Centocor R&D, Inc. (a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson). Full award details can be found here: www.bio-itworld.com/2010/04/21/best-practices-winners.html.