Dear Pioneers,

New subgroups have been created within this group in our efforts at the Gateway to create an ecosystem for theme and purpose based networking amongst key stake holders and bodies in the -OMICS area for improved collaborations and knowledge dissemination. The sub-groups are meant to identify diverse representative groups who make up this gateway. This will hopefully contribute towards better communication between members of this group.

Please feel free to join clans (subgroups) which are most applicable to you.

Industry clans http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2402000
Industry participants in the Genomics Pioneers Gateway- Pharma, Biotech, Services companies, Agrotech and others

Society Clans http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2402019
Representative members of leading Societies and Associations in the Genomic Pioneers Gateway

Academic Clans http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2402231
Representative groups from leading research centers, universities and government organizations in the Genomic Pioneers Gateway

Media Clans http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2402238
Global Media representatives at the Genomic Pioneers Gateway

thanks.

best regards,
Ashwin
—-
Group Coordinator
Genomic Pioneers Gateway
An Ocimum-Gene Logic Initiative
www.genomicpioneers.com
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Recently, Dr.Ron Hencin, VP, BioResearch Sales, talked with Pharma Services News (BioITworld) editor John Russell about Gene Logic’s plans for the future, its increased confidence and growing reach resulting from being part of Ocimum, and the rapidly changing genomics services market and competitive landscape.

Hencin: There’s certainly a shift away from the early target discovery days when people were searching madly for what kind of mechanistic things we could uncover with expression profiling. That’s still ongoing but it’s not the only thing. I think the shift has really been made to translational medicine. The question now is how can we take what we’ve learned in clinical and preclinical or tox studies and put it into the early phase clinical trials to develop markers to identify efficacy events or adverse events and more importantly to stratify the patients moving into trials to get a better population that’s going to save costs by not having as many non-responders. The biggest area of growth is in phase one and phase two clinical trials. I see the growth in areas where genomics can be applied in much larger trials and being able to have marker-based diagnostics that you will apply to your population to monitor it during the course the larger trials for both efficacy as well as adverse events. I think that the whole genomic ADME screening market is kind of a no brainer. You have to do this because there will be more of these markers that are almost mandated by FDA as well as pharmaceutical companies

Read the complete interview at the BioITworld website

On the trail of Genomic Pioneers-James Lupski

The inaugural edition of our ‘On the Trail of Genomic Pioneers’ interview series features Prof. James R. Lupski, Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine. His research focuses on using human genetics, genomics, and molecular biological techniques to elucidate biological mechanisms for diseases. This interview gives fascinating insights into genomic disorders and discusses his research in this area.

Snippet from Prof. Lupski’s interview

“We do believe that CNV may be responsible for a lot more disease than currently believed or anticipated. The focus to date in approaches to human genetic traits has been, whether by virtue of the Mendelian model or a hypothesis generating search through genome-wide association studies (GWAS), the focus has been on base pair changes as being responsible for the variation leading to the genetic cause or susceptibility to disease traits. However, if we look just in the past year or two alone we have witnessed that when researchers open their minds to CNV as a mutational mechanism, and analyze their data with that thought in mind, one can find CNV being responsible for conditions such as autism and schizophrenia for which we previously have had a difficult time identifying specific genetic etiologies”

 Read more…

On the trail of Genomic Pioneers-James Lupski