I define translational bioinformatics as the field where bioinformatics meets clinical medicine. Work in translational bioinformatics will typically include informatics methodolgy, clinical concepts (drugs, diseases, symptoms, diagnosis), and molecules (genes, proteins, DNA, RNA, small molecules, drugs). The Second AMIA Summit on Translational Bioinformatics just ended yesterday, and I predict great things for this meeting–it has all the right ingredients to become an important venue for this emerging field. It was organized by Atul Butte last year (first ever) and was followed up by Yves Lussier this year. Peter Tarczy-Hornoch will organize it next year, again in SF.
I had the pleasure both years of presenting a “Year in Review” talk in which I picked out some papers that I thought were important, interesting, visionary, whatever. This process is obviously filled with pitfalls and the only claim that I can make is that these papers represented alot of outstanding others as representatives. I no doubt missed many critical papers, and please let me know about them as comments to this post.
In future postings, I will give a sense of what I said for each of the key areas I highlighted yesterday:
- Literature mining
- Genetic Privacy
- Genes x Environment
- Genes + drugs/small molecules
- Schizophrenia
- Gene networks for understanding disease
- Stem cell biology
- Potpourri
For now, this year’s talk is available . Last year’s talk is also available. Comments are welcome. I will post the full bibliography as soon as I can assemble it in a reasonable format. I had the privilege of reviewing the full Table of Contents from many journals, and of course there is a nagging worry that I missed entire journals. There is an interesting dynamics in the interplay of methods and biological results, as well. That deserves some discussion in a future post as well.
4 responses so far ↓
Jessie Tenenbaum // March 20, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Thanks, Russ- very much enjoyed the talk, and looking forward to the bibliography, which I’ll share with my colleagues at Duke. (Atul and Yves- if you’re reading this, I’ve been raving about the conference every chance I’ve had since returning.)
Genetic privacy « Building confidence. // March 22, 2009 at 2:03 am
[...] Real quick: what is bioinformatics? ← Translational bioinformatics [...]
Kathy Miller // June 17, 2009 at 2:31 am
Hi Russ: If you do this next year, please let us know! We could definitely use this in BCR.
Kathy
Jeff Williamson // August 26, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Thanks for the translational bioinformatics thread. The 2010 call for participation is out and AMIA is taking submissions through 9/24/09. This might be of interest to your readers.