bioinformatic session

Dr. William Slikker, Jr. was the former director of FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research (NCTR). He received his Ph.D. in pharmacology and toxicology from the University of California at Davis. Dr. Slikker holds adjunct professorships in the Department of Pediatrics, as well as the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. He has held committee chairmanships or elected offices in several scientific societies; including the Teratology Society (serving as president) and the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (chair, Developmental Pharmacology Section and member, Program Committee). Dr. Slikker is also the co-founder and past president of the MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society. He is currently associate editor for NeuroToxicology and associate editor for the “Environmental Health” section of Experimental Biology and Medicine. He is the past president of The Academy of Toxicological Sciences and the Society of Toxicology. He is a recipient of the 2014 George H. Scott Memorial Award from The Toxicology Forum and was invited to present the Warkany Lecture at the 2015 annual meeting of the Teratology Society. In early 2019, the Academy of Toxicological Sciences selected Dr. Slikker to receive the prestigious Mildred S. Christian Career Achievement Award.   read more...   read less

Dr. Weida Tong is Director of Division of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics at FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research (NCTR/FDA). He has served science advisory board for several multi-institutional projects in Europe and USA. He also holds adjunct appointment at several universities. In addition, he is the founder and board chairperson of newly established international MAQC Society. His division at FDA is to develop bioinformatic methodologies and standards to support FDA research and regulation and to advance regulatory science and personalized medicine. The most visible projects from his group are (1) conducting the Microarray and Sequencing Quality Control (MAQC/SEQC) consortium to develop standard analysis protocols and quality control metrics for emerging technologies to support regulatory science and precision medicine; (2) development of liver toxicity knowledge base (LTKB) for drug safety; (4) in silico drug repositioning for the enhanced treatment of rare diseases; and (4) development of various tools such as ArrayTrackTM suite to support FDA review and research on pharmacogenomics. In addition, his group also specializes in molecular modeling and QSARs with specific interest in estrogen, androgen, and endocrine disruptor. Dr. Tong has published more than 250 papers and book chapters.   read more...   read less

George Kass was trained as a biochemist. He received his PhD in biochemical toxicology from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm in 1990. After a post-doc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich he returned to the Karolinska Institute as Assistant Professor. In 1994 he moved to the University of Surrey in the UK where he became Professor of Toxicology. He moved to the European Food Safety Authority in 2009, where is Lead Expert in toxicology. He has published over 140 papers in the field of toxicology and chemical risk assessment.   read more...   read less

Mr Benjamin Er is the Acting Specialist Team Lead of the Statistics & Modelling team at SFA. He oversees data science projects undertaken by the team to provide insights on emerging risks to food safety in Singapore. These include looking at the risk factors contributing to gastroenteritis outbreaks locally, analysing trends in global food recall notifications and using text analytics to make sense of consumer feedback and web data for food safety monitoring. Prior to joining SFA, Benjamin worked as a Statistician at the Singapore Ministry of Health where he was involved in estimating the burden of diseases in Singapore, which helped inform policy makers and the public on the state of Singapore’s population health. Benjamin holds a Master of Science in Medical Statistics from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a Bachelor of Science in Computational Biology from the National University of Singapore.   read more...   read less

Dr. Peter Newham is the Vice-President of Safety Sciences in Clinical Pharmacology and Safety Sciences, R&D, AstraZeneca. In this role, he is accountable for the non-clinical safety dimension of the entire AstraZeneca R&D portfolio. The Safety Sciences organisation comprises departments in Cambridge UK, Gothenburg Sweden, Gaithersburg US and Waltham US delivering discovery phase “drug –hunting” safety, safety innovation, investigative toxicology, non-clinical regulatory safety, genetic toxicology, reproductive toxicology and safety pharmacology for a broad and diverse range of drug modalities. Key safety innovation programs include development of advanced cell models, micro-physiological systems coupled to quantitative systems pharmacology models to enable translational risk assessment of emerging drugs. Applications of multi-omics, including spatially resolved metabolomics and transcriptomics are being developed to establish higher resolution understanding of drug effects at the cellular and tissue level. With increasing volumes of data being generated, machine-learning approaches are utilized and are being developed to accelerate safety hazard identification and improve design and selection across various drug modalities.   read more...   read less

Dr Ruth Roberts is Chair and Director of Drug Discovery at Birmingham University, UK and is Cofounder of ApconiX, an integrated toxicology and ion channel company. Before that Ruth was Global Head of Regulatory Safety at AstraZeneca (2004-2014) and Director of Toxicology for Aventis in Paris, France (2002-2004). Ruth is current Chair of the HESI board of Trustees, has served on SOT council and is past president of EUROTOX, the British Toxicology Society (BTS) and of the Academy of Toxicological Sciences (ATS). Ruth was the recipient of the SOT Achievement award in 2002, the EUROTOX Bo Holmstedt Award in 2009, the SOT Founders award in 2018 and is the recipient of the 2022 ATS Millie Award, given for outstanding achievement. ApconiX recently received the 2022 Queen’s Award for Enterprise. With more than 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals, Ruth is committed to developing and implementing science-led approaches to drug discovery and development.   read more...   read less

Professor Tim Gant is Head of the Department of Toxicology at UKHSA and Visiting Professor at Imperial College London School of Public Health. He trained in Toxicology and Pharmacology at the School of Pharmacy, University College London (undergraduate and postgraduate). He is a European Registered Toxicologist, Fellow of the British Society of Toxicology and Member of the American Society of Toxicology. Post PhD he undertook postdoctoral periods with the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda USA (1988 to 1993) and Medical Research Council UK (1993 to 2002). With the Medical Research Council he was appointed to tenure (2002) and group leader (2002 to 2011). He moved to a position within the Health Protection Agency (HPA) in 2011 to pursue interests in the translation of science to public health, research, and training in government. The HPA subsequentially transitioned to Public Health England (PHE) in 2013 and to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) on October 1, 2021. Within UKHSA he chairs the Postgraduate training sub-committee for UKHSA which oversees support for postgraduate training within UKHSA and is co-lead for the Affiliated Research Centre of PHE which is incorporated within the Open University of the UK. He currently directly supervises one PhD student (microplastics). He is Co-Editor of Toxicology Letters the journal of the European Society of Toxicology. He currently serves (chair for 3 years) on the Emerging Issues Committee of the Health and Environmental Sciences Institute, Washington DC, and on the Scientific Advisory Board of ECETOC. For six years chaired the scientific sub-committee of the British Toxicological Society. He co-leads a program grant between Imperial College and UKHSA funded by the National Institutes of Health Research called Environmental Exposures and Health (https://eeh.hpru.nihr.ac.uk/).   read more...   read less

Prof. Maurice Whelan is Deputy Director of the Directorate for Health, Consumers and Reference Materials of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) and head of its Chemical Safety and Alternative Methods Unit, based in Ispra, Italy. He also heads the JRC's EU Reference Laboratory for alternatives to animal testing (EURL ECVAM). Maurice is the EU co-chair of the OECD Advisory Group on Molecular Screening and Toxicogenomics that is responsible for the OECD programme on Adverse Outcome Pathways; a member of the Steering Committee of the European Partnership for Alternative Approaches to Animal Testing (EPAA); and chair of the Regulatory Advisory Board of the European Organ-on-Chip Society (EUROoCS). His publications include over 200 scientific papers and a book on the validation of alternative methods for toxicity testing. He has held a number of external appointments including the 2017-2018 Francqui Chair for alternative methods at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB, Belgium) and is currently visiting Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Liverpool (UK).   read more...   read less

Prof. Susanna-Assunta Sansone is a Full Professor in Data Readiness at the University of Oxford, an Associate Director and Principal Investigator at the Oxford e-Research Centre, and the newly appointed University-wide Academic Lead for Research Practice. She is also a Consultant for Springer Nature, and Founding Honorary Academic Editor of the Scientific Data journal. An author of the FAIR Principles, she is a recognized as a world thought leader on data sharing and reuse. Susanna leads on the R&D Data Readiness Group, in the Oxford's Department of Engineering Science, and focuses on data sharing, reproducibility and the evolution of scholarly publishing. She has 22 years of experience in these areas. Before joining Oxford in 2010 she was a Team Coordinator at the EBI for 9 years, and previously a Senior Scientist in one of the spin-out companies of Imperial College, where she got her PhD in Molecular Biology. In the Life Science she is the driver behind many flagship resources in the European research data infrastructure, such as FAIRsharing and the FAIR Cookbook (co-developed with pharmas), which are also resources of the ELIXIR Interoperability Platform, where she is an ExCo.   read more...   read less

Dr. Yuanting Zheng is an associate professor at the School of Life Sciences of Fudan University. She is the executive secretary of the China chapter of the international Massive Analysis and Quality Control (MAQC) Society. Her research focuses on reference materials for multiomics quality control, aiming to translate multiomics technologies into clinical companion diagnosis. Dr. Zheng has been spearheading the Chinese Quartet Project (chinese-quartet.org) for quality control and data integration of multiomics profiling since 2016 by developing, characterizing, and disseminating the reference materials of DNA, RNA, proteins, and metabolites derived from the same immortalized B-lymphoblastoid cell lines of a Quartet family of father, mother, and identical twins. Dr. Zheng's research is funded by several grants from the National Key R&D Project of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in genomics and clinical pharmacology with >2000 citations by SCI journals.   read more...   read less

PDr. Leming Shi is a professor at the School of Life Sciences, Human Phenome Institute, and Shanghai Cancer Center of Fudan University. Dr. Shi’s research aims to improve the success rate of drug discovery and development and to promote precision medicine by generating and integrating high-quality multiomic data. During his tenure at the US FDA, Dr. Shi conceived and led the MicroArray and Sequencing Quality Control (MAQC/SEQC) consortium together with Dr. Weida Tong for quality control and standardization of transcriptomic and genomic data, publishing four special issues in Nature Biotechnology. These efforts led to the launch in 2017 of the International MAQC Society (www.maqcsociety.org) to enhance the reproducibility of high-throughput technologies. Dr. Shi served as its first president and is its Chief Science Officer and a member of the board of directors. Dr. Shi was a co-founder of Chipscreen Biosciences and co-developed the chemogenomics-based drug discovery platform, resulting in the marketing approvals of one novel HDAC inhibitor (Chidamide) for treating cancers in China and Japan, and one novel PPARα/γ/δ pan-agonist (Chiglitazar) for treating type 2 diabetes in China. More recently, Dr. Shi and his collaborators developed a multiomics-based molecular subtyping approach for precision treatment of triple-negative breast cancers, significantly improving patient survival. Dr. Shi has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers with >15,000 citations by SCI journals and an h-index of 60, and (co-)led the development of four ISO and CLSI standards and guidance on data quality in genomics and transcriptomics.   read more...   read less

Michael Renaudin studied social anthropology and later sociology at the University of Bern. After working in IT, project management and adult education (in the private and public sectors), he studied human resources. He has worked at Swissmedic for 12 years. He was first responsible for organisational learning and development, and is currently head of Swissmedic 4.0, Swissmedic's innovation lab. The aim is to quickly develop solutions in the field of AI by developing prototypes and MVPs in order to exploit the technological potential of these solutions on the one hand and to promote the digital skills of employees on the other. The holistic approach of Swissmedic 4.0 also includes the dimensions of people and organisation. In his role, he is responsible for leading the digital initiative, as well as for the areas of strategy, innovation and information/communication.   read more...   read less

Prof. Lam is the Associate Vice President (Strategy and Partnerships) and Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He is currently also the Executive Director of the Strategic Centre for Research in Privacy-Preserving Technologies and Systems (SCRiPTS), and Director of NTU’s SPIRIT Smart Nation Research Centre. From August 2020, Professor Lam is also on part-time secondment to the INTERPOL as a Consultant at Cyber and New Technology Innovation. He served as the Director of the Nanyang Technopreneurship Center 2019-2022, and as Program Chair (Secure Community) of the Graduate College at NTU 2017-2019. Professor Lam has been a Professor of the Tsinghua University, PR China (2002-2010) and a faculty member of the National University of Singapore and the University of London since 1990. He was a visiting scientist at the Isaac Newton Institute of the Cambridge University and a visiting professor at the European Institute for Systems Security. In 2018, Professor Lam founded TAU Express Pte Ltd, an NTU start-up which specializes in AI and Data Analytics technologies for Smart Cities applications. TAU is a spin-off of the Intelligent Case Retrieval System project, a collaboration between NTU and the Singapore Supreme Court. In 1997, he founded PrivyLink International Ltd, a spin-off company of the National University of Singapore, specializing in e-security technologies for homeland security and financial systems. In 2012, he co-founded Soda Pte Ltd which won the Most Innovative Start Up Award at the RSA 2015 Conference. In 1998, he received the Singapore Foundation Award from the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in recognition of his R&D achievement in Information Security in Singapore. Prof Lam received his B.Sc. (First Class Honours) from the University of London in 1987 and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1990. His research interests include Distributed Systems, IoT Security Infrastructure and Cyber-Physical System Security, Distributed Protocols for Blockchain, Biometric Cryptography, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity.   read more...   read less

Alexander Horst studied business information technology and was ever since interested in leveraging biomedical data as a basis for human decision-making. At Swissmedic, the Swiss agency for therapeutic products, he works within the Swissmedic 4.0 team where he and his colleagues work closely together with both internal and external Stakeholders to find opportunities within the constantly changing digital age. They experiment with innovative approaches, such as involving machine learning or big data with the goal of making the artifacts and knowledge available throughout the organization.   read more...   read less

Dr. Nicolas Perez Gonzalez is a Data Scientist at Swissmedic, the Swiss Agency for therapeutic products. After obtaining his Ph.D at The Johns Hopkins University, he moved to Switzerland to work on Clinical Machine Leaning in the University Hospital of Zurich and the University of Zurich where he developed a multimodal model for comprehensive analysis of images and reports in the hospital as well as optimization algorithms among other projects. He currently works with the Swissmedic 4.0 Team as the technical lead in the MediCrawl project at Swissmedic but has additional projects focused on medicament recognition from images, and document similarity. His work focuses in innovation and the implementation of new technologies within Swissmedic. These solutions are mostly oriented towards the improvement of processes at Swissmedic making the stakeholder’s engagement of key for the success of these innovative solutions.   read more...   read less

Dr. Wenjun Bao is a Chief Scientist and Director of advanced analytics for JMP statistical Discovery, SAS Institute Inc. Before joining SAS, she was an Intramural Research Training Award (IRTA)Fellow at NIH (National Institutes of Health), a professor at Duke University, and a scientist at the US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). She has rich experiences in clinical, bioinformatics, biochemistry, and molecular biology research. She has expertise in variety data analysis including AI/ML models in clinical trial and genomics data analysis and text mining with multiple publications in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Bao has been a research grant review committee member for NIH since 2005 and a research adviser for scientists at universities and government agencies. Dr. Bao is a Board of Director for CDISC and an adjunct professor at Fudan University.   read more...   read less

Dr. Sebastian Maurer-Stroh studied theoretical biochemistry at the University of Vienna and wrote his master and PhD thesis at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP). After FEBS and Marie Curie fellowships at the VIB-SWITCH lab in Brussels, he has been leading the sequence analytics portfolio in the A*STAR Bioinformatics Institute (BII) since 2007 and Infectious Disease Programme since 2010. He is the Executive Director of BII since January 2021. His computational team is well known for successes at the public-private interface in Singapore from Precision Medicine to Consumer Product and Food Safety through protein allergenicity assessment and of course for his critical contributions to national and global viral pathogen surveillance through the GISAID data science initiative that has become the single most important source for virus outbreak data sharing and analysis in this pandemic powering public health responses globally.   read more...   read less