Dear all,
You are invited to participate in a talk on “Big Data, Bioinformatics and Medicine: Precision Medicine in Cancer” organized by the Bioinformatics group of University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC), University of Colombo.
Resource Person: Dr. Mahesh Iddawela (E.J. Whitten Fellow & Medical Oncologist, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Clinical Sciences Prostate Cancer Research Program, Department of Anatomy & Developmental Biology, Monash University, Australia)
Venue: Board Room 1, UCSC, University of Colombo
Date and Time: 11th January 2018, 3:30 pm
Synopsis:
“The volume of biological data collected during the course of biomedical research has exploded, thanks in large part to powerful new research technologies. The availability of these data, and the insights they may provide into the biology of disease, has many in the research community excited about the possibility of expediting progress toward precision medicine—that is, tailoring prevention, diagnosis, and treatment based on the molecular characteristics of a patient’s disease.
Mining the sheer volume of “Big Data” to answer the complex biological questions that will bring precision medicine into the mainstream of clinical care, however, remains a challenge. Nowhere is this challenge more evident than in oncology. By some estimates, by the end of 2017, just the research performed using next-generation sequencing of patient genomes will produce one exabyte—one quintillion bytes, 1018 bytes, or a million times a million times a million bytes—of data annually. Much of these data will come from studies of patients with cancer.
I will talk about how “Big Data” is used to investigate important pathways in prostate cancer and how it can be used to answer important questions about biology and to optimise treatment “