Symposium Lead Organizer Dr. Frederick Roth: “The promise of personalized medicine requires that we know how to interpret the impact of billions of genetic variants that already exist in humanity,”
With just six weeks away from the opening session, the fifth annual Mutational Scanning Symposium, to be held in-person and online June 13 and 14 in Toronto, now has most of its speakers confirmed. An online-only poster session will be held on June 16th. More information, including registration details, are available here.
“The promise of personalized medicine requires that we know how to interpret the impact of billions of genetic variants that already exist in humanity,” said Dr. Frederick Roth, the symposium’s lead organizer and a professor at the University of Toronto and senior investigator at Sinai Health. “This meeting is the key event of the year to keep up with large-scale approaches to solving this daunting challenge.”
BBI’s Dr. Doug Fowler will deliver one of two keynote speeches. He is director of the Center for Multiplexed Assessment of Phenotype at the University of Washington, as well as being an associate professor of Genome Sciences at the UW. Dr. Clare Turnbull, a professor of Translational Cancer Genetics in the Division of Genetics and Epidemiology at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, will deliver the other keynote address.
Among the speakers are three individuals serving on the Executive Committee of the Atlas of Variant Effects Alliance, an international collaboration committed to propelling systematic measurements of variant impact on functional elements of human and pathogen genomes. These are Fowler and Drs. Debora Marks and Matthew Hurles. Marks is a researcher in computational biology and an associate professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School; Hurles is the head of human genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and honorary professor of Human Genetics and Genomics at the University of Cambridge.
Other confirmed speakers include:
• Dr. Benedetta Bolognesi, a group leader at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia in Barcelona
• Dr. Belinda Chang, a professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto
• Dr. Zhenya Ivakine, a scientist of Genetics and Genome Biology at Sick Kids and Assistant Professor, Department of Physiology, at the University of Toronto
• Dr. Jacob Kitzman, assistant professor of Human Genetics and Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan
• Dr. Christian Landry, professor in the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science and Engineering, at Laval University in Quebec City
• Dr. Holly Rees, associate director and Head of Lead Discovery at Beam Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts
A wide range of topics will be discussed in keynote and breakout sessions, including:
● Computational variant effect prediction
● Target identification and resistance
● Germline variation in common diseases, cancer risks, Mendelian disorders and pharmacogenomics
● Sequence/structure/function relationships
● Somatic variation in cancer
Corporate sponsors of the event include: Deep Genomics, Illumina, Invitae, CIFAR, Octant, Ambry Genetics, and Medicine by Design.
Academic partners include: BBI, CMAP and the Atlas of Variant Effects Alliance . As of May 1, it is assumed the event will proceed in a hybrid format. If circumstances should require moving to an online-only event, information will be available here.
