Archived Content
Cambridge Healthtech Institute & Bio-IT World's Inaugural
Bioinformatics
June 7-8, 2012
Day 1 | Day 2
THURSDAY, JUNE 7
12:30 Conference Registration
13:25 Chairperson’s Remarks
Hsiufen Chua, B.Sc, Regional Manager, Sales, Partek
13:30 Personalizing Medicine for Asians
Richie Soong, Ph.D., Research Associate Professor, Centre for Translational Medicine, National University of Singapore
Personalized medicine promises the next major increment in improving health outcomes. In addition to individuals, the concept also can be applied to the healthcare management of regional populations, each of which have genetic and environmental bases to handling and responding to drugs differently. I will describe some of the efforts we have been making to characterize trends in Asians that could lead to better health management of populations in the region.
14:00 Developing Tools and Algorithms for Personalised Vaccines
Ee Chee Ren, Ph.D., Principal Investigator, Singapore Immunology Network, A*STAR
The development of vaccines has largely followed a “one size fits all” paradigm, in which a homogeneous preparation (strain or protein) is administered to a genetically diverse population. By using a combination of MHC-peptide refolding analysis together with structural data, we are able to select with high accuracy, antigen epitopes that can elicit an immune response. This protocol provides the capability for custom selection of antigen epitopes to deliver personalized therapy.
14:30 Assessing Genome Stability of Human Embryonic Stem Cells
Paul Robson, Ph.D., Senior Group Leader, Developmental Cellomics Laboratory, Genome Institute of Singapore, A*Star
Stem cell-based therapies often require significant cell expansion in culture to achieve the numbers required for subsequent use in the clinic. It thus becomes essential to evaluate the genomic stability of these cells in culture to avoid transfer of deleterious mutations. In this talk, I will discuss the recent findings of the International Stem Cell Initiative in which 125 human embryonic stem cell lines and 11 induced pluripotent stem cell lines, from 38 laboratories worldwide, were analyzed for genetic change occurring over extended culture.
15:00 Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing
15:30 Proteomics for Personalized Medicine
Chanchal Kumar, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Computational Biology, MSD Translational Medicine Research Centre Singapore
Proteomics has progressed radically in the last decade, achieving high throughput, broad coverage, and accurate quantitation that were until recently only characteristic of genomics technologies. Advances in mass spectrometry(MS) have played a pivotal role in this transformation, thereby opening newer vistas for diverse systems-wide proteomic investigations in biomedical research. In this talk, I will focus on current state-of-the-art and emerging paradigms in mass spectrometry(MS)-based proteomics, which in combination with innovative experimental strategies, and advances in computational methods will enable precision proteomics for personalized medicine.
16:00 NGS Sequencing of T and B cell Repertoire: Applications in Biomarker Discovery, Vaccine Evaluation, and Personalized Treatment
Jian Han, M.D., Ph.D., Investigator, iRepertoire Inc., Hudson Alpha Institute for Biotechnology
The R10K Project is an international collaborative effort to sequence the immune repertoire (IR for both T and B cells) from 10,000 samples that cover 100 diseases. We have developed a novel multiplex PCR method, which can amplify targets from a complex genetic material, inclusively and semi-quantitatively. This easy-to-use technology has been successfully applied to amplify immune repertoire libraries from peripheral blood samples or solid tissue samples. The natural duty of the adaptive immune system is to detect any internal and external threats and mount specific and measured reactions accordingly. Our pilot studies have demonstrated that immune repertoire sequencing can be used to measure this specific response and identify disease-related T cell CDR3s. Therefore, analyzing the immune repertoire of several disease states with high throughput sequencing may lead to the discovery of disease-specific biomarkers for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment evaluations. The R10K project is organized and supported by the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, a nonprofit research institute specialized in genomic research. A Scientific Advisory Board has been established to help identify projects from online submitted proposals. The R10K data will be made public 6 months after they are generated.
16:30 Genomic-Discovery Context for Exploiting Useful Patterns
Yi-Ping Phoebe Chen, Ph.D., Professor & Chair, Head of Department, Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering, La Trobe University
Solving modern biomedical problems, especially those involving genome data, requires advanced computational and analytical methods. The huge quantities of data and escalating demands of modern biomedical research increasingly require the sophistication and power of computational techniques for their pattern discovery. In this talk, I will demonstrate recent methodologies and data structures for gathering high-quality approximations and modelling of genomic information, and will use these innovations as the basis for developing methods to cluster and visualize biomedical data in pattern discovery.
17:30 – 18:00 Dinner Short Course Registration
18:00 – 20:00 Dinner Short Courses
Day 1 | Day 2