Will Francis Collins Be The Next Head Of The NIH?

Rumors have been flying about who President Obama will appoint to head the National Institute of Health (NIH). Since the beginning of the Obama administration, Francis Collins has been considered one of the frontrunners for the post, but in the last two weeks the rumor mill seems to think that Collins is as good as appointed.

On Saturday, the LA Times reported that “a source familiar with the selection process” said that Collins was in the final stages of screening. The general consensus of the scientific community is that Collins will pass the screening with flying colors.

Collins was the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) for 15 years where he spearheaded the campaign to map the human genome. When he stepped down from that position a year ago the then-head of NIH, Elias Zerhouni, said “Francis has provided 15 years of outstanding leadership to NHGRI and has been a trailblazer in the scientific community at large. His contributions to the world of genomics and medicine have been enormous. He has been a tremendous colleague, friend, and brilliant visionary. I know that he will continue to make groundbreaking advances in biomedical research.”

In addition to an intimate understanding of both basic and clinical research, Collins also knows his way around Capitol Hill. When he led the human genome project, he created the ELSI program in order to research the ethical, legal and social implications of the human genome science. Collins’ concern about those issues led to him working closing with Congress on the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act (GINA). Last summer the New England Journal of Medicine did a video interview with Collins as a supplemental to his paper Keeping pace with the times–the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008. Watching the interview you can see many characteristics that would make Francis Collins an excellent leader for the NIH.

Click here to watch the New England Journal of Medicine video – The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008:An Interview with Dr. Francis Collins

RECOMB 2009 – Notes from May 18th

Monday was a great day at RECOMB. The first keynote talk started at 8:45am and at 8:00pm, when the poster ended, people were still energetic and active. At the end of the day, I was tired but not near as I had expected to be. The mental stimulation of all the interesting ideas and conversations was highly effective in counteracting physical fatigue.

It was such a full day that it is hard to pull out just a few highlights, but there were a few presentations that seemed to generate the most interest. Even though it was the first talk of the day and was followed by many excellent talks, people were buzzing about Mark Gerstein’s presentation Large Scale Analysis of Protein Interaction Networks all day long. The Slonim lab’s Evaluating Between-Pathway Models with Expression Data also generated a significant amount of discussion. The Beerenwinkel lab presented a very well-received talk Deep Sequencing of a Genetically Heterogeneous Sample: Local Haplotype Reconstruction and Read Error Correction.

The poster session was one of my favorite parts of the day. I love the active exchange of poster sessions. Prepared talks delivered with PowerPoint slides are an efficient way to deliver information but it is passive method of information exchange. A poster presentation is so much more active and dynamic.

The poster presentation that I found most interesting was A Computational Homology Analysis of CGH Data Finds Recurrent Genomic Instability in Older Breast Cancer Patients. The presenter, Daniel DeWoskin of the Arsuaga and Park labs, did an excellent job explaining his exciting research. Daniel’s work looks at changes in DNA and what those changes can tell us about cancer. He and his co-workers have developed a new computational method for analyzing copy number variation. Their method significantly improves the signal to noise ratio in the analysis of CGH data. They used this method to analyze a published dataset from a breast cancer study. Daniel and his co-workers found age-dependent copy number variations on chromosome 16. The results are particularly exciting because age of onset is a strong prognostic indicator in breast cancer. The lab plans to continue this study by exploring chromosome 16 at the gene level. Identification of a marker gene could lead to the development of an early-detection screening assay for breast cancer.

This work will soon be published in the journal Topology and its Applications and is available online now.

RECOMB 2009 – Notes from May 17th

Yesterday was the first day of RECOMB 2009. The conference started off with a great opening reception. There was a palpable buzz in the room as everyone was excited to be here and very enthusiastic about the upcoming talks and posters.

There are about 300 people at RECOMB 2009 and I think that is an excellent size for a conference. At this size, the conference is small enough that you get a chance to talk with most people and large enough that you are continually finding someone new to talk with. Before the conference started I was hoping to meet and talk with Professors Donna Slonim and Ron Pinter. During last night’s reception, it was easy to find both Professor Slonim and Professor Pinter. It took a little patience to find a time to introduce myself because they were both frequently engaged in lively discussions with a group of people, but I got to meet them both. I also met several other people whose work I found very interesting.

Today is the first full day of the conference and the morning started off with a session on protein interactions chaired by Ron Pinter. No time to blog about it now, I have to get back for the next session – Martin Vingron is the chair and there are three talks on gene expression which I suspect will all be quite interesting.

I will give some details on today’s talk in tomorrow’s blog post. You can find the complete schedule of talks and lists of posters topics on the RECOMB 2009 website.

RECOMB 2009

This weekend I am heading off to Tucson Arizona to attend RECOMB 2009.  The name RECOMB comes from Research in Computational Biology, and the annual conferences attract many outstanding scientists whose research is at the intersection of computational, mathematical and biological science.

I am really looking forward to this conference!  While going over the program I saw some presenters I wasn’t familiar with.  I looked into their research to learn more and now I am quite excited about hearing some of these researchers present their work.  Two of these are:

Donna Slonim  Evaluating Between-Pathway Models with Expression Data

Ron Pinter  A Statistical Framework for the Functional Analysis of Metagenomes

The program also includes many names that are very familiar to me.  People whose work I have followed and admired for a long time like Steve Quake and Carlos Bustamante.  I know for a fact that both of them will give brilliant presentations and I can’t wait to watch Steve present his talk Single Molecule Sequencing of an Individual Human Genome and Carlos present his talk Population Genetics in the Personal Genome Era.

And of course I am looking forward to hearing the presentations from my NextBio colleagues! One of the NextBio cofounders, Mostafa Ronaghi, will deliver a talk entitled The New Era of Genomics and another of the NextBio cofounders, Ilya Kupershmidt, will be giving a talk called NextBio,  Ontology-Based Meta-Analysis of Global Collections of Public and Internal Large Scale Data.

 RECOMB 2009 promises to be a very stimulating conference.  While I am there I will be writing daily blog posts about the conference highlights so be sure to stay tuned.

The NextBio Travel Grant Continues!

The first NextBio Travel Grant was such a smashing success that we have decided to continue the program!

I am extremely happy that the NextBio Travel Grant will continue.  I remember how hard it was to live on a grad student stipend and what a relief it was when I received $500 from my department to offset the costs of attending a conference. But much more clearly than I remember the financial strain of attending conferences as a student, I remember the excitement of attending those conferences.  So many ideas, so many high-bandwidth conversations, so many people passionate about their work – all gathered together in a wonderfully enriched and rarified environment.

Every grad student should attend scientific conferences.  If you are grad student, why not apply for some free money from NextBio to help you get to one?  The money can be used to attend any scientific conference you like.

It is easy to apply – just write a one-page essay describing how NextBio has been useful to you in the pursuit of your research.  You can read the winning essays from the first travel grant here. The deadline for application is June 30th 2009.  For more details take a look at the Grants page on NextBio.

The New and Improved NextBio!

Have you seen our new look? As of this week, the NextBio website has a great new design!

The foundation of the new design is more intuitive user interface. Take the new site for a test drive and see what you think – I know you’ll like it. Do a query for a disease, gene, compound or tissue and you’ll see the new way we are presenting search results. A search for “breast cancer” will take you to the Breast Cancer page which is easy to navigate and packed with information.

Personally, I really like the new vertical tabs for navigation on the left hand side. But the updated NextBio website is not just about aesthetics and ease of navigation – we’ve improved features and added new capabilities. My colleague Ilya Kupershmidt, one of the NextBio cofounders, likes to draw attention to the new “recommendation engine”. This exciting new feature makes use of NextBio’s unique ontologies to recommend studies, literature, clinical trials, and news items to users based on their interests. To see what NextBio suggests for you, sign in to your account and go to MyNextBio.

I am very excited about the new website! We’ve been working on it for a few months now and it great to finally see it come to life. Now that it is launched, I can’t wait to hear what other people think of the new NextBio. Please let me know what you think in the comment section.