16/11/2009

II International Symposium on Biomedical Informatics in Europe

The II International Symposium on Biomedical Informatics in Europe joined more than 100 participants last October 30th in Barcelona. The symposium, held at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB) premises was organized by GRIB (IMIM/ UPF) and ISCIII in the frame of the network COMBIOMED: The Spanish Cooperative Thematic Research Network on Biomedical Computation (http://combiomed.isciii.es).

The COMBIOMED Network tackles several aspects of Computational Medicine, from basic to applied research, to develop methods and tools to solve scientific problems in biomedicine in the context of personalised medicine. It also plays at the same time a key role in the education of researchers in the field as well as in the training of health professionals and researchers in basic techniques for the management of biomedical information. The Network is funded by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III under the RETICS 2007 program.

Among the main objectives of the network are:

1. To provide a computational answer in three key scientific fields for the advancement of personalised medicine:
   • Disease-omics, facilitating the understanding of diseases at a molecular level.
   • Pharma-informatics, providing support to the processes of discovery, development and assessment of the use of drugs.
   • InfoPOC, favouring the support to clinical decision making at the point of care (POC).
2. To integrate the new computational developments of the network and to adapt others from the previous RETIC INBIOMED in the technological platform of the National Bioinformatics Institute (INB).    
3. To constitute the COMBIOMED-INB platform into the national and international point of reference on computational biomedicine, providing solutions to the computational challenges of basic and translational research and clinical practice on individualised medicine.
4. To provide leadership in research in Europe. Contributing to consolidate a position already acquired at an international level, in the biomedical informatics area as well as in the bioinformatics and computational biology domains.

The Network consists of 12 research groups belonging to universities and public research centres from six different autonomous communities in Spain. It is coordinated by the Medical Bioinformatics department (BIOTIC) of the ISCIII.

The event served as a forum to present the results obtained and discuss the current hot topics in Biomedical Informatics. It was structured in four sessions: 1) Biomedical Computing in Drug Research and Development, 2) Bioinformatics in Molecular Medicine, 3) Biomedical Information Processing: From atoms to Populations, 4) Biomedical Knowledge Management & Discovery.