Back to Asia: A Sneak Peak of Bio-IT World Asia

By Bio-IT World Editors 

 

May 1, 2013 | Bio-IT World is hosting its second annual Bio-IT World Asia event in Singapore at the end of May—expanded to five tracks—and this year co-located with the inaugural Molecular Medicine Tri-Con Asia. If the plush location at the Marina Bay Sands hotel wasn’t incentive enough, there are four days packed with essential life sciences programming covering IT infrastructure, the cloud, clinical and cancer genomics, bioinformatics and more. Our editorial wishlist is long, but here are a few highlights. 

 

Sir David Lane (A*STAR; Director, p53 Laboratory) will give the opening keynote, discussing the need for novel drugs that can disrupt protein-protein interactions and profiling two such drugs that have emerged from the cancer genome project. Novel methods of developing such inhibitors include the development of stapled peptides and new peptidomimetics. The challenges of developing this exciting new class of medicines will be discussed with reference to the action of Mdm2 inhibitors that activate the p53 pathway and the action pro-apoptotic BH3 mimetics that induce apoptosis. Tuesday, 28 May | 9:00

 

Most of the severe, congenital genetic disorders are caused by rare deleterious DNA variants, resulting either from recessively inherited or de novo DNA lesions in the affected individuals.  Paul Tam (The University of Hong Kong), will discuss how researchers use high-density SNP chips and next generation sequencing for the discovery of genomic lesions underlying congenital disorders.

 

Chris Dagdigian of The BioTeam will give one of his trademark overviews of the very latest in the life sciences landscape, this year focusing on the practical aspects of conducting discovery-oriented scientific computing on public IaaS cloud platforms. He’ll look exclusively at the research end-user and ultimate consumer of cloud services and discuss mistakes, hard lessons learned, and best practices from many years of science-based cloud work. Tuesday, 28 May | 11:30 am

 

Dominique Gorse of QFAB Bioinformatics, Australia, will give a tour of the Australian Genomics Virtual Laboratory, which provides cancer researchers with an accessible computational data infrastructure to access genomic datasets from multiple data sources and integrate them with their own clinical and genomic data. The Virtual Lab also hosts a set of tools for dataset and workflow publication. Tuesday, 28 May  | 15:50

 

A panel of researchers from Australia, Singapore, and the United States will take on the challenges of democratizing genomic research, including Andrew Lonie (Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative), Adam Yao (National Center for Genome Medicine, Institute of Biomedical Sciences), Carlos P. Sosa (Cray, University of Minnesota Rochester), Dominique Gorse (QFAB Bioinformatics, Australia), and Lavanya Veeravalli (Genome Institute of Singapore). Tuesday, 28 May  | 17:00

 

Patrick Boon Ooi Tan with Singapore’s Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy will give a keynote address on Wednesday. The incidence of cancer in Asia is rising, and cancers such as gastric, liver, and certain lymphomas that are frequently observed in Asia have significantly lower incidence rates in the West. What lifestyle and genetic variations are behind these differences? Tan will describe efforts to apply genomic analyses to a variety of Asian-specific cancer conditions, and how these technologies can rapidly illuminate new genes and gene variants related to cancer development and drug response. Wednesday, 29 May | 13:50

 

The citizens of the Faroe Islands have agreed to be sequenced en masse, and Bogi Eliasen (Faroe Islands Ministry of Health) Program Director of the FarGen project, will present the plan to implement routine whole genome sequencing in healthcare for a society of 50,000 people. The vision is to provide a foundation and resource for national and international research and to develop a genomic healthcare model. Wednesday, 29 May | 16:10

 

And just a few highlights from the Molecular Medicine Tri-Con Program: 

 

Tin-Lap Lee (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) and colleagues have established a Galaxy-based platform (CBIIT-GigaGalaxy) for fast and efficient genomic data analysis, and have implemented the first web-based Short Oligonucleotide Analysis Package (SOAP) for Next-gen sequencing analyses in a simplified drop-down menu format. Thursday, 30 May | 8:50

 

Samik Ghosh (The Systems Biology Institute, Tokyo) will share his experiences in applying systems biology approaches for targeted therapeutics in oncology with a key focus on cohort stratification, indication differentiation and combination partner selection. Wednesday, May 29 | 13:50

 

India is fast becoming a clinical trial hub because of several favorable factors including treatment naive subjects, less cost, strong IT support and proficiency in English. There have been several regulatory changes towards submission and review of INDs, ethics committee approval, mandatory registration of trials, audits, overseeing mechanisms of trials and ethics committees, and compensation guidelines. Y.K. Gupta (Pharmacovigilance Program of India) will discuss these positive steps to ensure the ethics and quality of clinical trial in India. Thursday, 30 May | 9:00

 

Daixing Zhou (Berry Genomics) has been profiled in Bio-IT World before. Non-invasive prenatal testing is rapidly transforming the field of prenatal screening and diagnosis, but like all technologies, it comes with shortcomings. Zhou will present the pros and cons of NIPT based on clinical practice in China and discuss the future directions. Thursday, 30 May | 13:50

 

For the full program, see www.bio-itworldasia.com .Bio-IT World Asia, May 28-31, 2013, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore