Bio-Nano-Info Integration for Personalized Medicine

Every disease has genetic and molecular basis. For example, in 2005, cancer became the number one killer in the USA for people under the age of 85. It is estimated that 1.3 million people will be diagnosed with cancer and more than 560,000 people will die each year. The underlying reasons for these statistics include the biological complexity of cancer as a disease which we are just now beginning to understand. The human genome project and other advanced technologies such as bionanotechnologies bring new hope to patient care because they can potentially address the disease on the molecular level. These new technologies, when linked to an individual patient´s molecular profile, can provide personalized and predictive early detection, diagnosis, prognosis tracking, and novel targeted therapies. In concert with development of these advanced technologies we must develop ways to validate the novel biotechnologies; methods to analyze the high volume of data coming from genomics, molecular imaging, and bionanotechnologies; and methods to interpret these data and make relevant predictions for patient care. This workshop keynote lecture will focus on how linking molecular biology, with advances in nanotechnology and information technology, to speed up the discovery and development process and clinical translation that leads to the advances in patient care. Specifically, the workshop keynote lecture will cover topics in ontology, data mining, data management, and image analysis that enable biomarker-based diagnosis, molecular imaging probe design, and therapeutic development.