Welcome to the Showcase for Biotechnology

Windber Research Institute, Windber Professional Services and their sponsoring partners are proud to announce that preparations are presently underway for the 2005 Showcase for Biotechnology.

Register for the 2005 event here...

Last year's event was held from Sunday, August 15 through Tuesday, August 17, 2004 at the new Frank J. Pasquerilla Conference Center in downtown Johnstown, PA.

The 2004 Showcase for Biotechnology theme was Integrated Bio-Medical Informatics and Enabling Technologies (IBET). The program featured:

• Keynote presentations
• A scientific symposium with internationally renowned speakers
• Poster sessions and workshops
• A vendor exhibit hall with displays of the latest technology
• Social gatherings
• Networking opportunities
• Spouse/family activities
• Prizes and giveaways

SFB 2004 Keynote Presentations

	John Weinstein, MD, Ph.D. Senior Investigator Laboratory of Molecular Pharmacology CCR, National Cancer Institute	Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics in Cancer Drug Discovery
	Emanuel F. Petricoin Ph.D. Co-Director, NCI-FDA Clinical Proteomics Program Senior Principal Investigator OCGT/CBER/FDA	Clinical Proteomcs: Applications at the Bedside
	Christoph Hergersberg, Ph.D. VP, Research, Discovery Systems GE Healthcare Biosciences	On the Road to Personalized Medicine: Seeing is Believing

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Integrated Bio-Medical Informatics and Enabling Technologies (IBET)

Introduction

The genomics, proteomics, biomedical informatics and data fusion communities have a wealth of experience in producing, mining and using information generated within their respective domains. Although these domains are largely separate and distinct, medicine will soon be evolving to incorporate the types of data that currently exist only in such domains as well as data in the laboratories of molecular biologists, geneticists, cell biologists, immunologists and computer scientists.

The successful movement of genomics and proteomics information into the clinic, however, will only be significantly accelerated when platforms are standardized and bioinformatics is seamlessly linked to medical informatics. This can be achieved by collaboration among clinicians, scientists, engineers and regulatory agencies, to bridge existing gaps among those disciplines, improving and standardizing the methods used in data collection, and efficiently managing the storage, analysis and retrieval of the massive amount of data generated from new large-scale experimental techniques such as microarray gene expression profiling, 2-dimensional gel electrophoresis, multi-dimensional chromatography and mass spectrometry.

The challenges associated with the generation of massive amounts of molecular information using automated systems and the linking of genotype and phenotype information offers interesting opportunities for collaboration between bioinformatics, medical informatics and biotechnology companies. Making this linkage is a key step in linking biologically and clinically useful information, elucidating biochemical pathways, stratifying disease, understanding the mechanisms of known drugs, discovering new drugs and moving scientific discoveries into the clinic fast.

Highlights

The 3rd Annual Integrated Biomedical-informatics and Enabling Technologies (IBET) symposium featured keynote/plenary lectures covering:

• Complex disease research
• Clinical genomics & proteomics
• Pathway mapping
• Disease modeling
• High throughput screening
• Systems biology
• Biomedical informatics

Also Featured:

• Vendor exhibit and Poster session
• Guided tours
• Hands-on workshops on:
  • cDNA microarrays
  • two-dimensional gel electrophoresis
  • microarray data analysis