First translational bioinformatics programme

At the end of April, Professor Søren Brunak, from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, was one of the main organisers at the first European conference on translational bioinformatics.

As hospitals accumulate more data on individual patients such as gene sequencing data – the so-called “omics” – there is also an increasing need for more knowledge on the bioinformatics that relate individual patient observations to phenotypes and various symptomatic subgroups.  This type of bioinformatics is usually termed clinical bioinformatics or translational bioinformatics.

The conference presented talks on these patient related fields, focusing on data from individual patients in terms of diagnostics and choice of treatments.

“In clinical bioinformatics, we are interested in what we term N=1 analyses, which often includes many different types of data on individual patients and utilizing the fact that they are complementary, “ says Professor Søren Brunak, who was one of the main organiser of the conference.

“When you investigate genome data and compare them to gene expression and proteome data, you are provided with new possibilities for understanding why a patient doesn’t react to a certain treatment, for instance,” Søren Brunak elaborates.

The speakers at the conference were primarily from Europe and the US.

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