Event: Big Data in translation medical research - molecular biology, genetics and imaging

Date: Thursday 28 April, 2016

Time: 15:00 - 16:00

Location: Rooms A&B, MRC SGDP Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, De Crespigny Park, Denmark Hill, London, SE5 8AF 

Molecular biology is now a leading example of a data intensive science, with both pragmatic and theoretical challenges being raised by data volumes and dimensionality of the data. These changes are present in both “large scale” consortia science and small scale science, and across now a broad range of applications – from human health, through to agriculture and ecosystems. All of molecular life science is feeling this effect. As molecular techniques – from genomics through transcriptomics and metabolomics – drop in price and turn around time there is a wealth of opportunity for clinical research and in some cases, active changes clinical practice even at this early stage. The development of this work requires inter-disciplinary teams spanning basic research, bioinformatics and clinical expertise.

This shift in modality is creating a wealth of new opportunities and has some accompanying challenges. In particular there is a continued need for a robust information infrastructure for molecular biology and clinical research. This ranges from the physical aspects of dealing with data volume through to the more statistically challenging aspects of interpreting it. A particular problem is finding causal relationships in the high level of correlative data. Genetic data are particular useful in resolving these issues.

Ewan Birney is Director of EMBL-EBI with Dr Rolf Apweiler. He played a vital role in annotating the genome sequences of human, mouse, chicken and several other organisms, and led the analysis group for the ENCODE project, which is defining functional elements in the human genome.  He has received a number of prestigious awards including the 2003 Francis Crick Award from the Royal Society, the 2005 Overton Prize from the International Society for Computational Biology and the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Award for contributions in Open Source Bioinformatics. Ewan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014 and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015.

He will outline the overall challenge present in this new, interdisciplinary field, and illustrate progress with specific imaging genetics results in heart from a collaboration involving his own research group.  The event is open to all; coffee and refreshments will be served afterwards.


Tags: Events - Precision psychiatry -

By NIHR Maudsley BRC at 15 Apr 2016, 11:27 AM


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