Advances in translational bioinformatics and population genomics in the Asia-Pacific

Translating translational medicine into global health equity: What is needed?

While genomics, and other omics, research is rapidly advancing in the US and Europe, progress has been slower in less resourced countries. The imbalance has given rise to concern about whether the benefits of these advances, namely new and better tests, treatments, risk identification, and prevention strategies, will be shared and available to those living in less resourced reaches of the globe. In effort to give voice to researchers, an informal survey about barriers to advancing translational medicine was administered to attendees of the 11th Asia Pacific Conference on Human Genetics, 2015, Hanoi. The overall goal of the survey was to identify unmet needs and rank their importance. Most attendees completed the survey. Not surprisingly funding is indicated as a major need. Respondents reported that lack of bioinformatics and computational tools, trained data scientists and access to datasets is creating a significant lag behind better resourced regions. Results are intended to inform efforts to create a regional consensus statement of need. Such a regional statement could help funding organizations and policy makers seeking to promote global genomics benefit sharing.

InCoB2012 Conference: from biological data to knowledge to technological breakthroughs

Ten years ago when Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network held the first International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB) in Bangkok its theme was North-South Networking. At that time InCoB aimed to provide biologists and bioinformatics researchers in the Asia-Pacific region a forum to meet, interact with, and disseminate knowledge about the burgeoning field of bioinformatics. Meanwhile InCoB has evolved into a major regional bioinformatics conference that attracts not only talented and established scientists from the region but increasingly also from East Asia, North America and Europe. Since 2006 InCoB yielded 114 articles in BMC Bioinformatics supplement issues that have been cited nearly 1,000 times to date. In part, these developments reflect the success of bioinformatics education and continuous efforts to integrate and utilize bioinformatics in biotechnology and biosciences in the Asia-Pacific region. A cross-section of research leading from biological data to knowledge and to technological applications, the InCoB2012 theme, is introduced in this editorial. Other highlights included sessions organized by the Pan-Asian Pacific Genome Initiative and a Machine Learning in Immunology competition. InCoB2013 is scheduled for September 18-21, 2013 at Suzhou, China.