Continuing with the abstract series covering the topics at the Eagle Symposium 2015, the following overview was kindly provided by Joke Reumers, Senior Scientist at Janssen, who will be addressing the subject of “Scalability, Reproducability and Cloud Computing for ‘omics in Pharma Research”
Abstract: “Next-generation-sequencing has become a commodity in translational research over the last years. While tool development has been largely driven by the academic community, the introduction of analysis pipelines going from raw sequence data to interpretable genomic and transcriptomic data in pharma research has led to a new set of functional requirements of these pipelines that are not always addressed. Issues such as scalable storage and computing, reduction of latency and especially stability and reproducibility of research are extremely important in discovery and biomarker research. The RNA- seq and DNA-seq analysis pipelines we have developed together with Eagle Genomics are currently being used for most NGS projects in oncology research within Janssen R&D, such as cell line profiling experiments and biomarker discovery in archival samples.”
Joke Reumers, Senior Scientist, Janssen
Speaker’s Bio: Joke Reumers obtained her PhD at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), focusing an integrative structural bioinformatics approach for the study of human genetic variation underlying conformational disease. As a postdoctoral researcher, Joke worked at the Vesalius Research Center (VIB / Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), where she studied endometrial and ovarian cancer genetics using whole genome and whole exome sequencing in a search for biomarkers and clinical insights. Joke joined Janssen R&D in 2012, and as a member of the Computational Biology team has been working on scaling & automating NGS analysis, supporting various therapeutic areas for biomarker and target identification, and more recently focusing on microbiome analysis. She is also one of the work unit leaders of the Exascience Life Lab, a collaboration between Janssen, Intel, IMEC and 5 Belgian universities investigating HPC solutions for NGS analysis and data visualization.
Eagle Symposium 2015: Eagle Genomics organises an annual industry symposium in the promotion of innovation and advancement in genomics, bioinformatics, and computational biology to help address global issues. The Eagle Symposium 2015 builds on the theme “Bridging Biology and Informatics for R&D Innovation“, taking place on 23 March 2015 at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.