Symbolic Systems Forum - Russ Altman, Genetics, Bioengineering, and Medicine Departments

Russ Altman, Genetics, Bioengineering, and Medicine Departments, "Pharmacogenomics: Challenges of Building Information Systems for Modern Biomedicine"

ABSTRACT:

Pharmacogenomics is the study of how variation in the human genome

leads to variation in the response to drugs. It is one of the ways

in which the human genome will enable "personalized medicine."

Pharmacogenomics is an incredibly complex field, with interactions of

genes, drugs, people, heredity, population genomics, and all kinds of

experimental data. Thus, it is fundamentally an information

technology problem. In this talk, I will introduce the field, and

discuss our efforts in building a knowledgebase for pharmacogenomics,

PharmGKB (http://www.pharmgkb.org/), and performing research to

improve our ability to handle the data and thereby accelerate

progress.

BIO:

Russ Biagio Altman is professor of genetics, bioengineering &

medicine (and of computer science by courtesy) at Stanford

University. His primary research interests are in the application of

computing technology to basic molecular biological problems of

relevance to medicine. He is currently developing techniques for

collaborative scientific computation over the Internet, including

novel user interfaces to biological data, particularly for

pharmacogenomics. Other work focuses on the analysis of functional

microenvironments within macromolecules and the application of

nonlinear optimization algorithms for determining the structure and

function of biological macromolecules, particularly the bacterial

ribosome. Dr. Altman holds an M.D. from Stanford Medical School, a

Ph.D. in medical information sciences from Stanford, and an A.B. from

Harvard College. He has been the recipient of the U.S. Presidential

Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a National Science

Foundation CAREER Award, and the Western Society of Clinical

Investigation Annual Young Investigator Award. He is a fellow of the

American College of Physicians and the American College of Medical

Informatics. He is a past-president and founding board member of the

International Society for Computational Biology, an organizer of the

annual Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, and an associate editor of

the Bioinformatics journal. He currently directs the Stanford Center

for Biomedical Computation, and he won the Stanford Medical School

graduate teaching award in 2000.