2023 Wrapped: OracleBio's Year in Review
As 2023 draws to a close, and as is our annual OracleBio tradition, we reflect on what we’ve achieved as a team over the past year, highlighting key milestones and appreciating the efforts across the company.
It’s been a strong and extremely exciting year here at OB HQ. We’ve seen the continued expansion and development of our team, including a new training academy, the delivery of exciting new and improved services, the launch of our sister company Sciento, the delivery of lots of scientific leadership content, relationship-building trips throughout the US & EU, team building social events, and a whole lot more.
Continue reading as we dive deeper into some of this year’s highlights and give you a peek at what’s to come in 2024!?
People & Culture
“The greatest asset of a company is its people” – JP Lemann.
This quote is engrained in our culture. As we grow and thrive as a company, we must ensure that our people do too. Throughout 2022 and 2023 we invested heavily in internal skills and development for our team, implementing company-wide training programs, a robust training academy for new starts, an e-learning platform, and courses for junior managers through to our leadership team to ensure everyone had the right tools and knowledge to excel in their roles.
In fact, across the company, we collectively spent 3,110 hours (428 working days!) in training, skills, and development this year.
People & Culture highlights in 2023:
It wasn’t all work and no play this year! We’re committed to continuing to build our culture outside of the office.
In 2023 we had several team ‘socials’, including street food, cocktails, bowling, karaoke, and half marathons, with the flagship social being the Edinburgh Marathon relay.
It was a fantastic experience (and team-building opportunity), with the two OracleBio teams who entered placing a very respectable 38th and 75th out of the 251 relay teams while raising funds for a fantastic charity at the same time.
OracleBio Training Academy
Continued growth is fantastic, but it brings its own challenges. It means continued onboarding of new team members and getting them up to speed as quickly and efficiently as possible.
With this in mind, we took the challenge head-on and decided to create our own internal Training Academy which is designed to train new image analysis scientists rigorously and efficiently in the latest image analysis software and techniques.
A lot of work has gone into developing the in-house training academy to create an extensive training ‘package’ with help from many members of the OracleBio team; our Image Analysis (IA) team and also support from various departments – it has been a truly collaborative effort.
The training academy has the addition of dedicated team members to co-ordinate the updates and new feature information from each software package, namely Indica Labs HALO? and Visiopharm?, as well as an overall training coordinator to ensure that the training is up-to-date and constantly evolving to our business and trainee needs.?
Several members of the team have already progressed through the training programme successfully and are now supporting live studies.
Lastly, the academy isn’t only for new team members, we’re also continuously training our existing scientists, giving them continued development to more advanced aspects of studies.
OracleBio On the Road
Conferences & Business Development
We were delighted to attend and have our work presented at key industry events throughout 2023.
Our team jetted off to New York City to exhibit and present at the 9th Digital Pathology & AI Congress: USA; showcasing our automated quality control pipeline technology and how we utilise AI Deep Learning to improve segmentation accuracy of Macrophages in multiplex IF stained tumor tissue. At SITC (Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer conference) in San Diego we presented on ultrahigh-plex to high-throughput spatial phenotyping. We also attended the 10th Digital Pathology & AI Congress in London, presenting on the accurate segmentation of distinct cell populations using AI Deep Learning to optimise our workflows.
Our work was also showcased at AACR (the American Association for Cancer Research conference) in Orlando and SfN (the Society for Neuroscience conference) in Washington DC.
You can further view these scientific posters in the ‘Research, Thought Leadership & Partnerships’ section below.
As well as conferences, it was a packed calendar for our team as they made several trips to the East and West Coast USA and various European destinations to build and secure key relationships with Pharma, Biotech, and Central Lab clients; helping to solidify OracleBio as a leader within our field.
Reflecting on the year, we’re very pleased to see the huge amount of interest in our research and the continued growth of the OracleBio brand around the globe.
STEM Activities
Our team was proud to continue our role as STEM ambassadors this year.
We took part in ‘Ada Lovelace Day’ at our HQ at BioCity Scotland – the celebration of achievements of women in science, with two of our team sharing their unique career journeys within Life Science and giving the students hands-on image analysis challenges that they embraced and had fun with.
We also visited New College Lanarkshire’s Motherwell campus for the ‘Step Into STEM’ event, where we had the pleasure of engaging with hundreds of students of different ages and backgrounds, discussing their career aspirations, and hopefully planting seeds for future leaders in science.
Over the course of these events, we discussed the many possible routes to a successful career in science and answered burning questions around some of the myths of being a modern scientist, highlighting that not all science is done in a lab!
Research, Thought Leadership & Partnerships
We ramped up our content this year with several poster collaborations, thought leadership articles and partnership activity; including interviews and webinars – we’ve listed some of the most popular pieces below.
Scientific Posters
We were proud to release several new Scientific Posters covering a range of topics:
Our scientists and the wider team have been working hard to ensure we have regularly released content on a range of research and studies we’ve been working on throughout the year.
This content has been popular with our growing online community and clients, so you'll be happy to hear it'll be continuing in 2024 - be sure to follow us here on LinkedIn to stay up to date.
Our 5 most-read articles of 2023:
Check out our full library of articles and insights here.
Case Studies?
Want to find out more about some of the studies we’ve worked on? Here are some of the recent case studies:
领英推荐
View more of our case studies here, and be sure to keep an eye out for many more case studies being rolled out in 2024.
Partnerships & Collaborations
?In November we partnered with Akoya Biosciences for an exciting joint webinar, ‘A Ready-to-Analyze High-Plex Spatial Signature Development Workflow for Cancer Immunotherapy’.
OracleBio’s Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Lorcan Sherry, and Akoya’s Sr. Data Scientist, Dr. Aditya Pratapa, presented a new workflow for analyzing multiplex immunofluorescence images.
The session covered several key topics, including:
You can watch the full webinar on-demand here.
During the SITC conference in San Diego, OracleBio image analysis scientist, Matthew McFarlane, caught up with Regan Baird from Visiopharm team to discuss how we utilise their new Phenoplex module and how we use the software to overcome challenges with multiplex image analysis.
Watch the discussion here.
While at SITC, Matthew continued to be in the spotlight with Akoya recording his presentation of our collaborative Ultrahigh-plex poster.
He did a fantastic job telling the study’s story – check out the clip here.
Research & Development
2023 was the year of maximising quality for the R&D team.
Continuous improvements of our automatic Image Quality Control (QC) pipeline have been at the top of the list to ensure it generalises to the most common image formats, tissues, and stain profiles. Over the past few months, we have extended the scope of the tool by adding a Stain QC module for multiplex immunofluorescence images, which enables our scientists to quickly spot under or over-stained tissue sections.
The aim for 2024 will be to continue the development of the tool, implement user feedback, and improve the user experience.
We’re also continuing our collaboration with the University of Glasgow-led INCISE (INtegrated TeChnologies for Improved Polyp SurveillancE) project, which in March got its funding extended until 2025. The focus for this second phase will be to refine the polyp risk stratification tool built over the past three years.
OracleBio is leading the Digital Pathology work package and is in charge of performing analysis on over 2,700 patient samples stained with different IHC markers. We're very proud to be part of such an important area of research.
The work the R&D team is doing is critical to supporting the continued evolution of OracleBio and ensuring we remain at the cutting edge of our field. We’re excited to see the strides they make next year.
Quality & Compliance (GCP – Good Clinical Practice)
Our quality and compliance group works as the unsung heroes behind the scenes to ensure OracleBio works to all of the relevant quality, ethical, and legal standards.
Some of the 2023 highlights from the group:
The group dives deeper into the new GCP-compliant AWS environment in the 2-part blog series below – they’re well worth a read:
New Service: FTE (Full-Time Equivalent) Model
Our new FTE model has been extremely popular with our clients due to its flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and allowing clients the ability to kickstart their image analysis capabilities. Tapping into OracleBio’s collective image analysis knowledge is highly attractive to our clients as every FTE has the support of a wider group of image analyst experts within OracleBio. The knowledge transfer from OracleBio can also help a client's internal team improve their workflows.
The model allows clients to engage OracleBio’s image analysts on a flexible contract basis, giving them the option to contract our image analysts for a fixed period of time; contracts from 3 months and longer. It can even be applied on a full-time or part-time basis to suit client requirements.
Learn more about our FTE model and its benefits here.
Introducing Sciento – OracleBio’s Sister Company & Cloud Infrastructure and IT Services Provider
At the start of 2023, we were delighted to announce the launch of OracleBio’s sister company, Sciento.
Sciento is the architect behind QDPconnect – the purpose-built Digital Pathology cloud infrastructure that OracleBio scientists use daily.
QDPConnect is a cloud infrastructure designed to host your Image Analysis software, such as Indica Labs HALO? or Visiopharm?, ensuring the software works optimally and provides the best possible user experience for scientists.
Deploying QDPConnect alleviates any angst that scientists can have about remote access, poor computer performance, software instability due to poor computing, lack of GPUs for deep learning, and waiting around for data. It allows them to work efficiently and quickly and turn all their attention to advancing their research.
We’re excited to now be able to offer this same IT infrastructure via Sciento, to others in the field; helping power their own in-house image analysis in an efficient, cost-effective manner by removing the barriers of traditional IT models.
What’s Next? Moving into 2024
This year was a year of reinvestment and strengthening of our service offering, expanding our team and infrastructure to support our continued growth and industry demand for our expertise.
2024 will be another exciting year of growth as 2023’s strategy comes to fruition and we see many clients coming back for repeat business and the growing popularity of our FTE model and AI-powered GCP environment.
Expect to see us more in person as we look to attend more conferences throughout the US and Europe, and expect to see more thought leadership and video content showcasing our latest research, opinion pieces, and behind-the-scenes at OracleBio.
If you’d like to find out more about our work or services, don’t hesitate to contact our experts to arrange a chat in the new year.?
In the meantime, we wish you happy holidays and look forward to connecting with you again in the year ahead!
This post is written by OracleBio’s Senior Marketing Manager, Mark Laurie.
With over a decade in senior marketing and sales roles within the IT, technology, and entertainment sectors, Mark brings a fresh perspective and unique skill set to lead OracleBio’s global marketing and communications efforts; helping share our story and build our community.
Compliance Officer Counter Avoidance
11 个月Well done to you all, love seeing the progress and how you are continually growing and expanding. Amazing work ??????