Fios in 2020

Season’s greetings from everyone at Fios Genomics! While 2020’s holiday season looks different from previous years, we hope you take a well-earned break before the new calendar year begins.  

Nice to e-meet you

Before travel restrictions worldwide came into effect, our Business Development team were busy, physically meeting with our clients. They travelled to seven countries, including six US states, in just over two months! 

The biggest change for Fios in 2020 has been the necessary shift from meeting face-to-face to conference calls. Since early March, we have met with our clients and contacts virtually – but this hasn’t meant we are any less busy! Over 100 data analysis projects for pharmaceutical companies, biotechs to academic institutes have been completed this year to date. 

This year, our team has often helped clients in analysing proteomics and transcriptomics data for their research, and our data mining and landscaping capabilities were still among the most requested.  

If you would like to discuss bioinformatics support for your research in 2021, whether virtually or in-person when restrictions allow, get in touch now! 

Team growth

2020 is one of our biggest years of expansion yet. 16 new faces have joined our Operations and Commercial teams. We are pleased to welcome so many new team members to increase our bioinformatics expertise as we continue to grow! 

Find out more about some of the new areas of expertise we had added in our recent blog post.  

2020 also gave us two new bioinformatics team leaders, Laura Bennett and Loan Somarriba, as well as a new Head of Next Generation Sequencing, Paul McAdam. 

Publications and Talks

It has been a busy publication year for us, with 13 posters and papers published so far! You can find more information on our publications and posters pages.

Our team also released a new whitepaper on single-cell analysis, given the increased team capabilities, but also an augmented interest from our clients. The white paper can be accessed here, as well as two detailed case studies, on tumour fusion burden in prostate cancer and data mining for transcriptomic profiling in multiple tumour types. 

2020 also heralded three new webinars, from various members of our Operations team:

• Max Bylesjo, Technical Director, spoke with our partners at Charles River Laboratories, on “Bioinformatics: Mining Big Data to Discover Precision Oncology Therapies“. He spoke about how mining big data can help accurately stratify patients who will respond to therapies, driving decisions and allowing the best anti-cancer therapies to continue further into development.
• Lorna Jackson, Senior Bioinformatician, spoke at the Annual Biomarkers US Series on “Tumor fusion burden and the immune landscape of prostate cancer“. She explored what the genetic make-up of a tumour can tell us about its immune landscape, and described tumour fusion burden, a novel biomarker for immune cell infiltration and activation in prostate cancer.
• Dominic Pearce, Senior Bioinformatics Developer, spoke alongside Patrick Fadden of Charles River Laboratories, on The Value of Bioinformatics to Assess Novel Immuno-Oncology Therapies. They discussed a recent study with two syngeneic mouse models, and how bioinformatics analysis was able to determine their response to treatment.

Notable achievements

Casting your thoughts back to January 2020, our partnership with Charles River Laboratories began. It has been a successful first year, and we look forward to the partnership moving from strength to strength. 

In April, we were awarded Best Bioinformatics & Data Analysis Services Provider – UK by Global Health & Pharma – a fantastic achievement for the whole team!

In June, Bioinformatician Jack Sleight produced an open-access Shiny app to visualise COVID-19 data released from the Scottish Government. Featured by Edinburgh BioQuarter, Scottish Business Insider and Daily Business, Jack’s app allows users to dive deeper into the public data released daily, with clear visualisations and plots.

Events and Conferences 

2020 has been an interesting year for conferences and events. Gone are pastries and free pens, now in are online meetings and virtual booths. We attended two conferences at the start of the year in-person, the Festival of Genomics and the Annual Biomarkers UK Series in Manchester. 

 Since then, we have attended virtual conferences including the Annual Biomarkers US Series – usually held in sunny San Diego – and a number of bioinformatics and drug development events.

Find Us in 2021

Looking forward to 2021, it is likely that virtual events will continue to feature. While we are still finalising our events calendar, you will find us exhibiting and hosting a Mastermind session at the virtual Festival of Genomics and Biodata, at the end of January! Stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks about our involvement.

2020 has been an unprecedented year – for Fios, for the industry, and for the world as a whole. Enabling our clients to conduct ground-breaking research and take key insights from their data has been more vital than ever. We are pleased to continue our fantastic work, and we look forward to seeing what new challenges and opportunities 2021 will bring us!

Read our 2019 highlights post here. 

Happy New Year!