Key Disciplines for Establishing Personalized Medicine

"Bioinformatics and systems medicine are key disciplines that bring together the infrastructures for medical informatics and high-throughput sequencing. Both are to be expanded and developed in the coming years with funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and will make a significant contribution to the establishment of stratified or 'personalized' medicine," said TMF Chairman Prof. Dr. Michael Krawczak at the opening of the "Omics in Medical Research" workshop, which the TMF jointly organized with the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) today in advance of the 6th National Biobanking Symposium in Berlin.

"The so-called Omics technologies, such as genomics, metabolomics, or proteomics, which analyze huge amounts of data, are increasingly important in clinical routine — beyond the initial successes in the diagnosis and therapy of cancer," said Jürgen Eils from the DKFZ, one of the workshop's co-organizers.

Data protection and data security play a particularly important role in this development. "The development of precision medicine, and particularly genomics, poses numerous challenges for us. So far, only a few researchers work in this field, but we see solutions, for example, possible IT architectures or specific cryptographic techniques that we can use for the generation, processing, and protection of genomic and phenotypic data," explained Prof. Dr. Jean-Pierre Hubaux from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

For human medical researchers, there are already a number of omics tools, algorithms, and bioinformatic data standards as well as applications available. Great hope is also placed in machine learning and artificial intelligence methods for the further development of personalized medicine. In accordance with its mission to create synergies and network stakeholders across disciplines and locations, the TMF brought together clinicians, researchers, bioinformaticians, and medical informaticians with this workshop, thus continuing the work of the TMF Working Group Molecular Medicine, whose members have been dealing with topics from the fields of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS), Omics, Bioinformatics, and Systems Medicine together since 2012.

The workshop took place in advance of the 6th National Biobanking Symposium, which will be held on December 6 and 7, 2017. At this symposium, the interaction between biobanks, omics technologies, and IT infrastructures in biobanking, as well as issues of data protection, quality management, and sustainability, will be discussed.

The second day of the symposium begins with presentations from the newly initiated German Biobank Alliance and from the European biobanking infrastructure BBMRI. The symposium also provides a platform for dialogue between academic researchers and industry.