Category Archives: Conferences

Travel Grants Spring 2012 winner: Catarina Correia

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Jyoti M.. Filed under Conferences, Research, Travel grant

And finally, a big round of applause for our first place travel grant winner, Dr. Catarina Correia! She researches protein interaction networks in autism spectrum disorders and presented her recent results at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Toronto, ON last month. We’re glad the travel grant helped her attend!

I am currently pursuing a post-doctoral project at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência and Instituto Nacional de Saúde Dr. Ricardo Jorge (Portugal) working on the analysis of GWAS carried out by the Autism Genome Project (AGP), a large international consortium for autism genetics. My research aims to develop a network-based approach for GWAS data analysis by combining association results with protein-protein interaction data, and characterize potentially pathogenic CNVs identified in the AGP whole genome CNV analysis. Read more…

Travel Grants Spring 2012 winner: Malay Bhattacharyya

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Jyoti M.. Filed under Conferences, Research, Travel grant

Congratulations to our second travel grant winner! Read on to find out how he uses NextBio Research to explore oncogenic microRNAs.In Malay’s words:

I become truly amazed when I look back on my career and see how a student with undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Electronics turned into a biology researcher. In the very first week of graduate school, I received an article on microRNAs (miRNAs), a class of short non-coding regulators of protein-coding genes, from my supervisor. Ever since that first read, I have been hooked on these endogeneous RNAs for four years and counting. Read more…

Sorting through omics data for cancer biomarkers

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Jyoti M.. Filed under Case Studies, Conferences

Going to the AACR Annual Meeting? Visit our poster to find out more about a novel biomarker candidate for cancer!

The genome of a healthy person is constantly interacting with external signals and internal cues to adapt to a changing environment. Similarly, tumors also respond to the therapies aimed at removing them; chemotherapy and targeted molecular therapies can occasionally induce additional mutations or gene expression changes in tumor genomes. These secondary genetic changes are associated with increased drug resistance, recurrent forms of cancer and poorer chances of survival for patients.

Our presentation at the AACR Annual Meeting next week focuses on the correlations we identified for one such gene, sorting nexin 9 (SNX9). NextBio analysis of data correlations to SNX9 revealed several correlations of the gene to multiple types of cancer, including breast, prostate and other cancers. Read more…

Finding MARS mutants in the human exome

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Jyoti M.. Filed under Conferences, Research

Talks at the Sanford-Burnham Rare Disease Day Symposium highlight the “transformative potential of exome sequencing” for rare Mendelian diseases

Individually rare yet collectively common, ‘orphan’ or rare diseases affect nearly 30 million Americans every year. Despite the current explosion in genomic data and personalized medicine strategies, little is known about what causes these rare genetic disorders, how they progress or options for treatment. Marking Rare Disease Day, a one-day symposium at the Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, CA featured talks by several researchers studying disorders of glycosylation, especially in children. Several of these discussions highlighted how studying rare conditions can enhance the ways we detect, diagnose or research relatively more common diseases. Read more…

Announcing: Research Travel Grants

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Jyoti M.. Filed under Conferences, Contests, Travel grant

The latest round of NextBio Travel Grants is here!

We’re offering three grants to students and post-docs wishing to attend scientific conferences within the next one year. Read more…

Instant fit: tailoring prescriptions in the clinic

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Jyoti M.. Filed under Conferences, News

Scientists present clinical trial results for the first bedside genetic test

How quickly can clinicians accurately determine the way a patient will respond to medication, or their chances of getting a disease? It might even begin the minute they walk in the door. ‘Genotyping by eye’, as Atul Butte from Stanford University phrased it at a recent Xconomy forum, can be as instantaneous as noticing a patient is obese, a factor that increases chances of diabetes more than any known genetic variant today.

More precise genetic tests are fast catching up to this idea of near-instant genotyping as well. Researchers from the University of Ottawa recently demonstrated the success of a ‘bedside’ genetic test to optimize treatments for patients undergoing coronary stent implantations. At the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics symposium this week, the lead investigator, Dr. Derek So, presented the results of the RAPID GENE clinical trial, a point-of-care genetic test to identify carriers of a common genetic variant that reduces the efficacy of standard anti-platelet therapies. Read more…

Crowdsourcing solutions for life

Posted on October 21, 2011 by NextBio. Filed under Conferences, Guest Blogger, Open Science

From the lab to scientific publishing to clinical solutions, the Open Access movement is changing the way science advances

(Guest post by Joseph Jackson)

The 2^nd Open Science Summit is the weekend of October 22-23, 2011 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, just before the 2011 Open Access (OA) week, which runs October 24th-28th. Open Science evokes different associations for different people, depending on which part of the scientific process they most regularly engage with. One critical component focuses on access to scientific literature. The OA movement has made great strides in the last ten years with the creation and maturation of journals and publishers like PLoS and Biomed Central.

But the most critical shifts toward Open Science arguably are happening in the life sciences. The technological revolution underway in next generation sequencing is enabling, but also requiring bold new collaborative approaches to manage increasing complexity and accelerate the translation of scientific discoveries into desperately needed therapies.
Read more…

RECOMB 2009 – Notes from May 18th

Posted on May 20, 2009 by NextBio. Filed under Conferences, Research, Scientists

- Lisa Green

Monday was a great day at RECOMB. The first keynote talk started at 8:45am and at 8:00pm, when the poster ended, people were still energetic and active. At the end of the day, I was tired but not near as I had expected to be. The mental stimulation of all the interesting ideas and conversations was highly effective in counteracting physical fatigue.

It was such a full day that it is hard to pull out just a few highlights, but there were a few presentations that seemed to generate the most interest. Even though it was the first talk of the day and was followed by many excellent talks, people were buzzing about Mark Gerstein’s presentation Large Scale Analysis of Protein Interaction Networks all day long. The Slonim lab’s Evaluating Between-Pathway Models with Expression Data also generated a significant amount of discussion. The Beerenwinkel lab presented a very well-received talk Deep Sequencing of a Genetically Heterogeneous Sample: Local Haplotype Reconstruction and Read Error Correction.
Read more…

RECOMB 2009 – Notes from May 17th

Posted on May 18, 2009 by NextBio. Filed under Conferences, Scientists

Yesterday was the first day of RECOMB 2009. The conference started off with a great opening reception. There was a palpable buzz in the room as everyone was excited to be here and very enthusiastic about the upcoming talks and posters.

There are about 300 people at RECOMB 2009 and I think that is an excellent size for a conference. At this size, the conference is small enough that you get a chance to talk with most people and large enough that you are continually finding someone new to talk with. Before the conference started I was hoping to meet and talk with Professors Donna Slonim and Ron Pinter. During last night’s reception, it was easy to find both Professor Slonim and Professor Pinter. It took a little patience to find a time to introduce myself because they were both frequently engaged in lively discussions with a group of people, but I got to meet them both. I also met several other people whose work I found very interesting.

Today is the first full day of the conference and the morning started off with a session on protein interactions chaired by Ron Pinter. No time to blog about it now, I have to get back for the next session – Martin Vingron is the chair and there are three talks on gene expression which I suspect will all be quite interesting.

I will give some details on today’s talk in tomorrow’s blog post. You can find the complete schedule of talks and lists of posters topics on the RECOMB 2009 website.

RECOMB 2009

Posted on May 15, 2009 by NextBio. Filed under Conferences, Research, Scientists

- Lisa Green

This weekend I am heading off to Tucson Arizona to attend RECOMB 2009. The name RECOMB comes from Research in Computational Biology, and the annual conferences attract many outstanding scientists whose research is at the intersection of computational, mathematical and biological science.

I am really looking forward to this conference! While going over the program I saw some presenters I wasn’t familiar with. I looked into their research to learn more and now I am quite excited about hearing some of these researchers present their work. Two of these are:
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