Tuesday, 21th January, 2014, 12:00

Integrative strategies for biomedical knowledge.

The progress in biomedical research is increasingly hampered by the difficulty of managing and jointly exploiting the huge amount of information that is accumulated and that it is often fragmented into silos. Consequently, the biomedical knowledge discovery can deeply benefit from scientific, technological and organisational advances in the ways that biomedical information is integrated and jointly analysed.

Examples of efforts that we are doing in this direction are: 1) the IMI eTOX project, which tries to advance in the in silico prediction of the potential in vivo toxicity of drug candidates by means of information sharing among the pharmaceutical companies and the application of multi-level modelling strategies; 2) DisGeNET, which is a gene-disease database created by integration of gene-disease associations from several resources; 3) the EU-ADR project, which has developed innovative pharmacovigilance strategies by means of joint exploitation of millions of European healthcare records followed by bioinformatics substantiation of the drug-event signals detected; and 4) the recently started IMI EMIF project, which aims to develop a common information framework of patient-level data that will link up and facilitate access to diverse medical and research data sources, opening up new avenues for research.

Speaker: Ferran Sanz, professor of Biostatistics and Biomedical Informatics at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and Director of the IMIM-UPF Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB).

Room PRBB Auditorium