Starfish Storage Wins 2026 Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Award, Showcases Life Sciences Use Case at Conference

Award-winning ASU project reflects Starfish's broad life sciences impact, on display at Bio-IT World 2026 Booth 109

WALTHAM, Mass., May 06, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Starfish Storage, the leader in metadata-driven unstructured data management, today announced that it has won a 2026 Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Award in the Knowledge Management category for its work with Arizona State University’s Center for Evolution and Medicine. The award recognizes one of many Starfish deployments across life sciences, which will be on display at Bio-IT World 2026 in Booth 109. The company will demonstrate some of its work with pharmaceutical R&D teams, genomics research institutions, and global health science programs.

Bio-IT World's Innovative Practices Awards program, which has been running since 2003, recognizes partnerships and projects that advance bio-IT through strategies that can be shared and replicated across the industry. Each year, an independent panel of peer reviewers selects winners based on the significance of the problem addressed, the quantified return on investment the project delivered, and the potential for the approach to be adopted by other organizations. Starfish will be recognized at the conference plenary session on Thursday, May 21, 2026 at the 25th annual Bio-IT World Conference & Expo at the Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport in Boston.

The Award-winning Project: Turning a Two-decade Data Archive Into Live Research Infrastructure

The winning deployment at ASU’s Center for Evolution and Medicine transformed a 20-year archive of computed tomography (CT) imaging data from the Tsimane Health and Life History Project. This multi-institutional study of an Indigenous forager-horticulturalist population in lowland Bolivia, renowned for exceptional cardiovascular and metabolic health, had produced a medical imaging archive that was functionally unsearchable. Inconsistent DICOM metadata and the burden of manual consent verification for the Tsimane community's data governance agreements led to slow turnaround and compliance risks on every researcher request.

With Starfish, the ASU team normalized imaging metadata across decades of scanner evolution and exposed the archive through virtual directory views. Dozens of global collaborators who previously waited weeks for curated data exports can now obtain the imaging subsets they need in minutes, not weeks or months.

Starfish Across Life Sciences

Starfish serves 8 of the world's top 10 life sciences and pharmaceutical companies, addressing a wide range of data management challenges across pharmaceutical R&D, academic and federal research, and clinical science. Data from large-scale research programs often break conventional data management tools, making it difficult to govern, find, or move the data that researchers depend on for scientific continuity, regulatory compliance, and feeding the AI-ready data strategies the sector increasingly demands.

At a leading genomics research institute managing a rapidly growing volume of ‘omics data, Starfish cataloged 1.5 petabytes of data accumulated since 2013, identified approximately 200 terabytes of obsolete raw instrument files and cleared them, thus deferring an imminent multi-million-dollar hardware purchase intended to make room for more data production. They then automated ongoing data movement across active storage, on-premises archive, and offsite cloud backup. The same institution also used Starfish to automate metadata extraction from sequencing instrument runs, allowing it to track project data flows, understand storage consumption by lab, and create dashboards that support grant reporting, resource accounting, and capacity planning.

At a major US research hospital, Starfish automated the movement of data from more than 30 laboratory instruments across two research institutes, routing files to the appropriate storage destinations, thereby reducing research bottlenecks and increasing the efficiency of their analysis pipelines. Across these deployments, the operative pattern is the same: extract rich metadata at the point of data creation, then use it to automate the workflows that would otherwise consume research or IT staff time.

"When you look across these deployments, the specifics differ, but the underlying problem is the same," said Ari Berman, Chief Science Officer of Starfish Storage. "Life sciences organizations generate enormous volumes of data files of all types, formats, and sizes, and the conventional method for managing it amounts to varying degrees of cries for help from IT to delete some data, which quickly breaks down at the scale these teams operate at. Using Starfish, our customers are finding new and innovative ways to manage research data cooperatively between IT and research, which, combined with automated data management workflows, makes everyone’s lives easier and makes science go faster."

Starfish at Bio-IT World 2026

Starfish will be at Booth 109 throughout Bio-IT World 2026, May 19-21 in Boston. Visitors are invited to bring their toughest 2026 data management challenges and see live demonstrations of the Starfish platform, including reference architectures for data observability, implementation of FAIR data principles, automated archiving and chargeback, and self-service data access for research teams. Ari Berman will present in the Data Management track on Thursday, May 21, following the morning plenary award ceremony.

More information on the official Bio-IT World 2026 Innovative Practices Awards winners is available here. 

About Starfish Storage

Starfish Storage provides the world's most scalable and versatile file management platform. The platform features an Unstructured Data Catalog (UDC) for indexing and extracting metadata from multi-vendor, multi-PB storage environments, combined with Starfish's powerful Automation Engine for automating data flows. Starfish Zones provide end users with actionable views of their data. Starfish empowers organizations to gain control of their files on a large scale, in mixed vendor environments, optimize storage costs, and enhance data management practices. For more information about how your organization can unlock the power of its data, please visit Starfish Storage at https://starfishstorage.com/.

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OmniScale Media
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