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Organiser
Andres Metspalu, University of Tartu, Estonia
Introduction
The 10th Annual International Gene Forum 2010 (www.geneforum.ee) to be held on June 18-19, 2010, in Tartu, Estonia, will be an international high-level scientific conference on genetics and genomics. The conference will bring together leading experts in the field from Europe and other parts of the world for discussion of progress in the filed of genetics and genomics and, in particular, in interdisciplinary areas within human and population genetics, functional genomics and biomedicine, pharmacogenomics, emerging technologies and bioethics.
The conference will focus on three main topics :
1) Emerging Technologies. NexSeq technologies for discovering of rare variants in medical resequencing will be discussed. We will focus on results obtained by the current high throughput DNS (and RNA) sequencing technologies and will look ahead for the emerging sequencing platforms developed in several new companies. But also what novel technologies offer the established firms like Illumina, ABI “SOLID” or 454. Metagenomics and animal genetics are some of the fast developing areas gaining benefit from the NexSeq technology and hence, will be part of the conference programme.
2) Functional Genomics and Biomedicine. Predictive, preventive and personalised medicine or 3P as L. Hood put it will change the medical practice as we used to know it. It will take time, however, but first attempts are visible and discussions are going on how useful are the genetic (predictive) tests for common complex diseases or how far to go with diagnostic resequencing. In this respect we have invited several speakers who have first hand experience of that. Pharmacogenomics is developing fast making use of new array and sequencing technologies and thus, this topic will be included in the conference programme.
3) Functional Genomics and Society. Biobanking has been a topic in the series of Gene Forum conferences every year and has been also included in the program of this meeting. The Estonian Genome Project has reached close to 40 000 samples and although recruitment will continue in 2010, various research projects are going on in different disease areas and other traits. In this year's conference programme we intend to focus on various aspects related to the usage of biobanks, including ethical aspects.
The programme will be available shortly.
Gert Jan van Ommen, Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands
David Clayton, Cambridge University, UK
David Bentley, Illumina Inc, UK
Stephen Turner, Pacific Biosciences, Menlo Park, Ca, USA
Augustine Kong, DeCODE Genetics, Iceland
Daniel Frank, University of Colorado, USA
Ruedi Fries, Munich Technical University, Germany
Julia Kirchheiner, Institute of Pharmacology of Natural Products & Clinical Pharmacology, University of Ulm, Germany
Stephan Beck , UCL Cancer Institute, University College London, UK
Richard Gibbs, Human Genome Sequencing Center, Baylor College of Medicine, USA
Richard P. Lifton, Department of Genetics, University of Yale, USA
Jeffrey M. Friedman, Laboratory of Molecular Genetics , The Rockefeller University, USA
Mark Daly, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, MA
Joel Hirschhorn, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, USA
Edison T. Liu, Genome Institute of Singapore, Singapore
Svante Paabo, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
Thomas Kirkwood, Institute for Ageing and Health, Newcastle University, UK
Anne Cambon-Thomsen, INSERM, France
Jan Eric Litton, Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institute, Sweden
Wolf Rogowski, Helmholtz Centre, Munich , Germany
Marjo-Riitta Jarvelin, Division of Epidemiology, public health and Primary Care, Imperial College London, UK
The Gene Forum 2010 will take place in Tartu, the second biggest city of Estonia, rich in academic and historical traditions. The scientific sessions will be held in the Dorpat Conference Centre, located in the heart of the city.
Registration
Registration is now closed.
