Festival of Genomics 2020: Talk Highlights

For this year’s Festival of Genomics, hosted at the Business Design Centre in London, six of the Fios team attended. Three of our Bioinformaticians attended two days of talks; read on for more information on the speakers they listened to.

At the Festival of Genomics 2020, we were given the opportunity to listen to many exciting lectures on the latest highlights of genomics research and technology, and participate in various informative panel discussions.

Keynote sessions

Both festival mornings were filled with keynote lectures, with day one focusing on the investments into the precision medicine sector. With regards to the UK healthcare scenario, presentations gave an overview on how the NHS will be restructured to provide a better personalised medicine service, and highlighted the new genomics services that the NHS will be offering in the near future. In addition, we were introduced to the vast resources available via UK Biobank. This health resource database aims to accelerate discoveries surrounding the genetic causes of disease through storing data generated during the ambitious 500,000 genomes project that is aimed to finish by the end of 2022, and curation of important background and clinical data from each of the participants.

The keynote lectures of day two gave an overview of the future of Genomics England and introduced the audience to various data analysis platforms. An emphasis was put on the patients’ side of the data generation. The speakers talked about the creation of a transparent platform where patients can access their data, follow how it’s being used for research, and approve its use for different studies.

Speaking sessions

Both afternoon sessions proved to be very busy, with up to five sessions running in parallel. Broadly speaking, these talks could be divided into two categories: talks that focused on the technical or clinical aspects of data analysis, and talks that centred around data interpretation.

The technical lectures covered topics such as standardisation and automation of data analysis using machine learning and the advantages of deep learning-based tools. Data transfer, security and centralised storage was also the focus of many talks. With the exponential growth in the quantities of data now being generated across the globe every day, the importance of FAIR data principles were discussed, which have been designed to improve the quality, accessibility and re-usability of these vast amounts of ‘omics data. Several speakers also discussed the IT challenges that are being met and resolved to enable the storage, transfer and analysis of these large data sets.

The clinical lectures focused on the advantages of utilising genomics data for the research and diagnosis of diseases as well as de novo target discovery. This included discussion of techniques employing whole genome long-read sequencing, single-cell analysis, GWAS, PheWAS, analysis of the microbiome and sequencing of circulating tumour DNA. Researchers are now using ‘omics technologies to probe many different levels of regulation within diseases, and many talks focused on the advantages and difficulties of working with and integrating multimodal data sets. We were also introduced to various valuable data resources, such as Open Targets and Human Cell Atlas, and the vast amount of resources provided by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI).

Finally, we had the pleasure to participate in a keynote panel discussion on the importance and benefits of inviting patients to take part in the discussion of future research aims of diseases.

We are looking forward to attending the Festival of Genomics 2021 – and to hear more from fantastic speakers on their research and the latest advances in genomics and other technologies.

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