Genomic Medicine Edinburgh: Standout Talks

On the 15-16 May, we attended a local (to us) conference, the 6^th Annual Genomic Medicine Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland where our company is also based.

Conferences are a highlight of Fios’ calendar, as they allow us to hear about new research and insights from the industry and academia. Both days of the conference were busy – our stand was well-visited and we had many beneficial conversations about how our bioinformatics analysis can aid research. Talks from a mixture of both academia and selected industry were informative and it was a nice mixture of industries in the audience.

Standout Talks

Two standout talks were by Dr Alan Walker, Rowett Institute (University of Aberdeen) and Dr Hywel Williams, from Cardiff University.

Dr Alan Walker’s talk focussed on the microbiome, the most diverse ecosystem found in nature. The cumulative metagenome of the microbiome has 400,000 times more genes than the human genome. For individuals, the gut metagenome is over 50% different, meaning that the method to treat infections of the gut can vary quite significantly. There are many benefits to curating a healthy gut microbiome however there can be colonisation resistance when trying to encourage new bacteria to establish. Faecal transplants, one method to introduce new bacteria into the gut, have a 90% success rate for treating C. difficile in hospitals. Research into causes of changes highlighted urbanisation as one possible reason, with the change in diets and movement to a more sedentary lifestyle the main reasons.

Dr Walker’s current research focuses on microbiota and how it responds to host behaviour such as changes in diet.

Dr Hywel Williams’ talk focussed on the analysis of constrained coding regions to improve the diagnostic rate in the 100,000 Genomes Project. It was a fantastic talk on rare diseases and the information that can be gleaned for diagnosis and pathobiology by mining the 100,000 Genomes Project database. The genomes held in the database currently are 50% cancer and 34% rare diseases, making it a valuable database for both oncology and rare disease research.

Dr Williams’ research aims to improve our understanding of the pathobiological systems that when dysregulated lead to disease phenotypes in humans, with a focus on rare diseases. 

Post-Conference Meetings

Did you miss us at the conference? Send us an email and we can organise a call or meeting for you, to show how we can aid your data analysis. You can also visit our Bioinformatics Services page to find out more about our capabilities.

Find out more about the conference on the website. #GenMedEdi