The Select Six Best Practices

As always, we are dedicating our summer issue to a showcase of the winners of our annual Best Practices Awards competition. The six winning entries- from CliniWorks, Collaborative Drug Discovery, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis, and Oxford Nanopore Technologies- were introduced at the Bio-IT World Expo in April. Their stories are presented in the following pages.

This year's competition attracted 34 entries and prompted much frank deliberation among our judging panel, as they sought to identify the most important, novel, and potentially impactful collaborations and ideas from basic research and IT infrastructure to translational medicine. We believe that the winners of the 2011 Best Practices Awards offer some exciting stories that highlight the value of ingenuity and collaboration, impacting areas including drug discovery, diagnostics, and clinical research. We hope that some of these advances will have resonance across portions of the industry.

As always, thanks to our panel of 13 guest judges for volunteering their time and insights. We congratulate not only our winners (and their nominating organizations) but everyone else who took time to enter this year's competition.

We will have news about the make-up and timing of the 2012 awards in our next issue.

- The Editors