Thursday 1st December 2022
Location:
Lecture theatre 080.02.007
RMIT building 80 , Level 2
445 Swanston Street Melbourne
Registration Link for SBEI
Link to Speakers and Panellists
SBEI2022 is a full day “Symposium on Bioinformatics Entrepreneurship and Industry” that will be organised alongside the annual ABACBS Conference 2022.
The symposium will be focused on life beyond academia. Broadly the day will include a mix of keynotes and panel discussions covering;
Target Audience
Organising Committee
Monther Alhamdoosh (convenor, Professional Bioinformaticians Representative at ABACBS Executive Committee, Director, Head of Bioinformatics and AI at CSL Limited)
Eva Chan (co-chair, Member of ABACBS Professional Sub-Committee, Senior Bioinformatician at NSW Health Pathology)
Amit Kumar (co-chair, Lead Clinical Bioinformatician, Monash Health; Member of ABACBS Professional Sub-Committee)
Nhi Hin (Computational Biologist, Alkahest Inc.)
Paul Wang (Bioinformatics Fellow, Centre for Cancer Biology, SA Pathology and UniSA)
Ticket Pricing
Student
Non Student
Early Bird Ticket Pricing (before Oct 31st)
ABACBS Member: $20
Non-Member: $40
ABACBS Member: $60
Non-Member: $100
Ticket Pricing After October 31st
ABACBS Member: $40
Non-Member: $80
ABACBS Member: $120
Non-Member: $200
Program Structure
Session total: 1 h 30 mins
Talk: 35 mins
Panels: 55 mins
Sessions
Start
End
Welcome
Monther Alhamdoosh
8:50 AM
9:00 AM
Commercial/startup bioinformatics
Chair: Nhi Hin
9:00 AM
10:30 AM
Keynote: "Lessons in building a bioinformatics startup through open source and open science"
Evan Floden
9:00 AM
9:35 AM
Panel “From open source to commercial software”
Facilitator: Aaron Darling (Illumina)
Evan Floden (Seqera), Alexander Jarasch (Neo4J), Zhiliang Chen (Illumina), Stuart Midgley (DUG), Sean Liu (Qiagen)
9:35 AM
10:30 AM
Morning Tea
10:30 AM
11:00 AM
The fine line between data science vs bioinformatics
Chair: Amit Kumar
11:00 AM
12:30 PM
Keynote: "Domain expertise - a feature or a bug of a data scientist?"
Tatsiana Aneichyk (Independent Data Lab)
11:00 AM
11:35 AM
Panel: The fine line between data science vs bioinformatics
Facilitator: Roxanne Legaie (Peter Mac)
Tatsiana Aneichyk (Independent Data Lab), Nathan Watson-Haigh (Alkahest), Milica Ng (CSL), Jeff Christiansen (Australian BioCommons), Natalie Twine (CSIRO)
11:35 AM
12:30 PM
Lunch
12:30 PM
1:30 PM
Entrepreneurship workshop
Chair: Paul Wang
1:30 PM
3:00 PM
Translating science into commercial opportunities
Christian Toouli
This interactive workshop will present an overview and anecdotes into the pathways to commercialisation for biotechnology innovations, including important considerations for licensing and start up strategies.
Tea
3:00 PM
3:30 PM
Ready for the next career move?
Chair: Eva Chan
3:30 PM
5:00 PM
Keynote: "Data Science in the Pharmaceutical Industry"
Antoine De Weck (CCIA)
3:30 PM
4:05 PM
Panel: Bioinformatics career prospects and importance of mentorship in the next 10 years.
Facilitator: Eva Chan (NSWHP)
Antoine De Weck (CCIA), David Wood (Microba), Sarah Kummerfeld (Garvan), Boris Guennewig (smtr), Nicola Armstrong (Curtin)
4:05 PM
5:00 PM
Close
5:00 PM
5:15 PM
Social Event at The Oxford Scholar 427 Swanston Street Melbourne, VIC 3000 (register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sbei-social-drinks-tickets-474489820827)
5:15 PM
-
Keynote Speakers
Evan Floden
Evan Floden is the CEO and co-founder of Seqera Labs and a founding member of the Nextflow project. He is passionate about the future of computing and biology, having completed an MSc in Bioinformatics at the University of Bologna before joining the Sanger Institute in the UK. During his doctoral studies at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, he began working on Nextflow and co-founded Seqera Labs.
Tatsiana Aneichyk
Tatsiana is a bioinformatics scientific consultant and founder of OmicsChart. With background in mathematics and software engineering, Tatsiana started her bioinformatics career by PhD in Molecular Oncology, followed by a post-doc at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital. She founded what is today the largest freelance bioinformatics community in Europe - Independent Data Lab, with members and clients worldwide. Today she is building privacy-aware patient-centered platform for precision oncology, challenging current status quo in patient data use for clinical research and delivering the value to the patients directly.
Antoine De Weck
Associate Professor Antoine de Weck joined Children's Cancer Institute in January 2022 to establish and lead our new Computational Drug Discovery Biology Group. Antoine’s work at the Institute focuses on identifying new therapeutic vulnerabilities in childhood cancers, and identifying new or existing compounds capable of targeting those vulnerabilities. His Group is a key capability of THINK (THerapeutic INnovations for Kids), an initiative dedicated to generating new therapies specifically for children with cancer and moving these from the lab to the clinic as quickly as possible.
Entrepreneurship Workshop
Dr Christian Toouli Btech(Hons) PhD GAICD
CEO & Managing Director, FivepHusion
FivepHusion is a private biotech company developing Deflexifol™, an advanced clinical-stage enhanced formulation of the chemotherapeutic 5-FU and its biomodulator leucovorin for solid tumour treatment; offering reduced toxicity, improved safety and tolerability and superior efficacy compared to standard of care formulations.
Christian is a motivated and resourceful biotechnology executive, dedicated to the development and commercialisation of breakthrough medicines for patients and to creating value for shareholders. He has 23 years’ experience in cancer research, drug development and commercialisation. Christian was the co-founder and Executive Director of Bio-Link Australia, a biotech strategic advisory and business development company, and co-founder of Tessara Therapeutics and Imunexus, biotech companies developing cutting-edge therapeutics platform technologies. Previously, Christian was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Schering-Plough Biopharma / DNAX Research Institute in Silicon Valley, California. He holds a PhD from the University of Sydney and was awarded a Certificate in Biotechnology Management with Honours from the University of California, Santa Cruz Extension, and First-Class Honours in Biotechnology from Flinders University of South Australia. He is also a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
Sessions
Session 1
Aaron Darling
Alexander Jarasch
Dr. Alexander Jarasch is Life Science Program Manager at Neo4j and a board member of HealthECCO, a non-profit organization. With a background in bioinformatics, his career extends across several industries, including chemistry, biotech, pharma and IT. He has expertise in machine learning and data engineering, combined with his deep domain knowledge in pharma. In his previous roles, Alexander has been the Head of Data and Knowledge Management at the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD). He has received numerous awards for the innovative use of advance analytics’ techniques such as “Knowledge Graph” to combat widespread diseases, such as diabetes.
Zhiliang Chen
Zhiliang Chen is an executive bioinformatics sales specialist in Australia, mostly looking after Australia and New Zealand. Zhiliang has a bachelor of science and a PhD in bioinformatics. After working in UNSW as a postdoctoral researcher for 4.5 years, she thought she wanted to have a taste outside the academia world and joined Illumina as a bioinformatics support scientist. Zhiliang is now with Illumina for 6.5 years and has been enjoying serving customers in the commercial world.
Stuart Midgley
Stuart is DUG’s Chief Information Officer and self-confessed supercomputing evangelist. Stuart has a PhD in Theoretical Physics, and almost 30 years expertise in high-performance and cloud computing as a user, application developer, tool developer, system administrator, system architect and general HPC addict. Stuart designed and developed the patented, immersion-cooling technology, known as DUG Cool which has a climate positive impact on the ESG footprint and was also instrumental in the construction of DUG’s supercomputer facilities and DUG HPC platform across 4 continents.
Sean Liu
Sean is the customer solutions manger from Qiagen, he specially look after the Qiagen bioinformatics portfolio. Sean was graduated from University of Melbourne with a PhD in biomedical science. He had a few years post-doc experience and worked in a few NGS companies before joining Qiagen.
Session 2
Roxanne Legaie
Nathan Watson-Haigh
Milica Ng
Jeff Christiansen
Jeff leads Community Engagement at the Australian BioCommons, an effort that is ensuring computational infrastructure is established at a national level to support Australian life research communities, and that researchers are upskilled to use this infrastructure to support their research. He has a PhD in Biochemistry from UQ and started his career conducting research in the fields of cancer, molecular genetics and embryo development. He has since held many community facing roles in the UK and Australia, all focussed on developing computational infrastructure to support health and life science research - at the UK Medical Research Council (MRC), Australian National Data Service (ANDS), Intersect Australia Ltd, University of Queensland's Research Computing Centre, Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF), and the EMBL-Australia Bioinformatics Resource (EMBL-ABR).
Natalie Twine
Dr Natalie Twine is a Senior Research Scientist and leads the Genome Insights team at CSIRO. She is a recognised expert in translational genomics, cloud-computing and bioinformatics and has been awarded a Brilliant Women in Digital Health Award by Telstra Health in 2022 for her achievements in these domains. Her work is featured in high impact journal Cell Neuron (2018) and in media outlets such as Australian Financial Review (2019) and GenomeWeb (2020). Dr Twine leads the development of cutting-edge digital products which leverage new technologies in genomics, cloud computing and machine learning. These products deliver translational impact in the fields of precision medicine and digital health across academic, government and commercial sectors.
Session 3
Dr Christian Toouli Btech(Hons) PhD GAICD
CEO & Managing Director, FivepHusion
FivepHusion is a private biotech company developing Deflexifol™, an advanced clinical-stage enhanced formulation of the chemotherapeutic 5-FU and its biomodulator leucovorin for solid tumour treatment; offering reduced toxicity, improved safety and tolerability and superior efficacy compared to standard of care formulations.
Christian is a motivated and resourceful biotechnology executive, dedicated to the development and commercialisation of breakthrough medicines for patients and to creating value for shareholders. He has 23 years’ experience in cancer research, drug development and commercialisation. Christian was the co-founder and Executive Director of Bio-Link Australia, a biotech strategic advisory and business development company, and co-founder of Tessara Therapeutics and Imunexus, biotech companies developing cutting-edge therapeutics platform technologies. Previously, Christian was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Schering-Plough Biopharma / DNAX Research Institute in Silicon Valley, California. He holds a PhD from the University of Sydney and was awarded a Certificate in Biotechnology Management with Honours from the University of California, Santa Cruz Extension, and First-Class Honours in Biotechnology from Flinders University of South Australia. He is also a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
Session 4
Eva Chan
Dr Eva Chan is a Senior Bioinformatician with Statewide Genomics at NSW Health Pathology. Eva has over 15 years of bioinformatics experience spanning cancer genomics, human migration and agriculture, in both Australia and USA, and in both academia and industry. Eva’s focus at NSWHP is in the development of genomic analysis pipelines needed to process data from the Statewide Sequencing Service for clinical diagnostics. Prior to her transition to clinical genomics, Eva's research focused on understanding natural genetic variations and how such variations translate to phenotypic differences, including disease and population diversity. Eva is a member of the ABACBS Professional Bioinformatics subcommittee and is passionate about making bioinformatics a recognised profession in Australia.
David Wood
Sarah Kummerfeld
Associate Professor Sarah Kummerfeld is Director, Data Science at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. She uses computational methods to understand human disease and translate findings into clinical diagnostics and treatments. Sarah completed her PhD in Computational Biology at the University of Cambridge using machine learning to predict protein structure and function. She has worked both in academia and industry, including 10 years as a Scientist at Genentech, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. At Genentech, she used large-scale genomics approaches to understand why only some patients respond to treatment and to identify diagnostic biomarkers that predict response to particular drugs. Sarah is dedicated to applying computational approaches to benefit patients.
Boris Guennewig
Boris leads a bionformatics & biostatistics research group at the University of Sydney and is the CTO of smrtr a big data & analytics company. The production bioinformatics arm of his first start-up Pacific Analytics was acquired by GenieUs genomics in 2020. He is currently helping the build of the MRFF funded indigenous data commons platforms as well as helping other start-ups with their tech & governance needs.
Nicola Armstrong
Associate Professor Nicola Armstrong is currently working at Curtin University, as a teaching and research academic in Statistics and Data Science. Dr Armstrong is a statistical bioinformatician who completed her doctoral studies in Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Originally from Perth, she spent several years in the Netherlands before returning to Australia and eventually Perth. She is currently an Associate Professor in Statistics and Data Science at Curtin University. Her research work has centred on the development of statistical methodology and the application of statistics to problems in genetics, genomics and biomedical research.
ABACBS 2022 incorporating COMBINE, VCBS, SBEI and Bioc Asia
By Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society
November 28, 2022 - December 2, 2022
Monash College City Campus & RMIT