Computational Approches for Diagnoses of Genetic Diseases
June 2019, Munich
The Summer School "Computational approaches for diagnoses and Treatment of genetic diseases" took place in Munich in June 2019. The participants of the DAAD Network from Israel, Iran, Canada, Thailand, the USA, Colombia and Turkey enriched the Summer School with the international aspect. The focus of the event was on recent advances in computer-assisted approaches for the diagnoses and Treatment of genetic diseases. The event was started with the welcome of the participants by Professor Klein.
The first part of the Summer School focused on the presentation of different state-of-the art bioinformatical methods relevant in medical research. Werner Mewes, of the Technischen Universität München and Biomax, talked about „ the hunt for causalitys”. Biomax Informatics is a company, which develops software solutions based on the real needs of life science organizations. Other speakers were Stefan Canzar, Gene Center, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, who talked about Genetic diseases through the lens of the transcriptome and Michael Menden, Institute of Computational Biology, Helmholtz Zentrum München, who presented Pharmacogenetics in a nutshell. Julien Gagneur from Technische Universität München, spoke about Pinpointing disease-causing regulatory genetic variants by multi-omics and machine learning.
The second part of the Summer School focused on sequencing, immunity and genetic diseases. Prof. Klein from Dr. von Haunerschen Kinderspital, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the visiting international researchers like Aleixo Muise from The Hospital for Sick Children in Boston or Jose Luis Franco, University of Antioquia, Colombia presented interesting lectures on these Topics.
A poster session was also included in the Summer School. Eleven different posters were presented by young researchers, the participants had the opportunity to talk to the authors of the posters and discuss the results as well as the different presentations of the day. Many interesting discussions emerged. The different backgrounds of the participants and speakers from science and industry led to a multitude of interesting conversations. Overall, there were many opportunities for the participants not only to follow the presentations, but also to actively discuss among themselves and to make new contacts and networks.
We hope to be able to further expand the fruitful cooperation with the networks on rare diseases in the future so that the colleagues can benefit from the broad range of expertise.