Agenda: Informatics Channel at MMTC

December 12, 2014 | The Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference in San Francisco has a rich agenda with four content channels in addition to short courses and symposia. We have our eye on speakers across the program, but this year we are particularly interested in the Informatics Channel and the three tracks within: Genome and Transcriptome Analysis; Bioinformatics for Big Data; and Integrated Pharma Informatics & Data Science. Here’s the working draft of our agenda. 

— The Editors

We’ve written much on CRISPR in the past year. Jennifer Doudna, professor at University of California, Berkeley and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator will present a brief history of CRISPR biology from its initial discovery through the elucidation of the CRISPR-Cas9 enzyme mechanism to recent research results, providing the foundation for remarkable developments using this technology to modify, regulate or mark genomic loci in a wide variety of cells and organisms. Monday, February 16, 12:30 pm 

George Calin at MD Anderson Cancer Center is taking on “Noam Chomsky, DNA Patterns, Non-CodingRNAs and Cancer Patients”. MicroRNA and other short or long non-coding RNAs alterations are involved in the initiation, progression and metastases of human cancer, he says. Differential expression of non-coding RNAs in malignant compared with normal cells can be explained by the location of these genes in cancer-associated genomic regions, by epigenetic mechanisms and by alterations in the processing machinery. Expression profiling of human tumors has identified signatures associated with diagnosis, staging, progression, prognosis and response to treatment, as well as identification of targets of activated oncogenic pathways. Tuesday, February 17, 10:15 am 

David Haussler from the University of California Santa Cruz is giving two presentations on Wednesday. A morning talk on a new scheme being developed with assistance from the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health in which mapping to the reference genome and calling variants would become a precisely defined and relatively stable process (Wednesday, February 18, 10:45 am), and a keynote presentation on the global exchange of human genetic data for medicine and research. Wednesday, February 18, 4:10 pm 

James Taylor’s (Johns Hopkins University) updates on Galaxy are always valuable. He’ll be highlighting new features of Galaxy which are enabling analysis at increasingly larger scales, including UI and backend improvements. Wednesday, February 18, 2:20 pm 

David Anstey (Cray) will bring Hadoop to bear on patient centric NGS workflows. Using specific use cases, he promises to explain how NGS pipelines can be optimized to eliminate data movement and compute bottlenecks, and how the data generated by the NGS workflows can be rapidly integrated with patient data to support cohort selection and precision medicine initiatives. Monday, February 16 at 4:10 am 

Atul Butte (Stanford) is always fascinating, and he will discuss his lab’s work using publicly-available molecular measurements to find new uses for drugs including drug repositioning and discovering new treatable inflammatory mechanisms of disease in Type 2 diabetes. Tuesday, February 17 at 3:10 pm 

Angel Pizarro of Amazon Web Services will give an overview of how several different customers use AWS services to create scalable performance and cost effective solutions for genomics and health big-data workflows. He will present best practices for combining S3, Glacier, EC2, EMR, RDS, and RedShift to produce a robust platform for genomics. Wednesday, February 18 at 10:45 am 

Grant Campany, Senior Director of the XPRIZE, will give an update to the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE competition. The goal is a portable, wireless device in the palm of your hand that monitors and diagnoses your health conditions, promising radical innovation in healthcare. Wednesday, February 18 at 5:10 pm 

An all-star panel on the Assembly, Creation and Implementation of Data Science Groups for Pharma is sure to be rich. Martin Leach of Biogen Idec moderates Susie Stephens (Pfizer), Juergen Hammer (Roche Innovation Center New York), and Jake Klamka (Insight Data Science Fellows Program). Tuesday, February 17 at 11:45 am