SYSTEMS

The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) will hold its fourth annual international symposium on Sunday, April 24th and Monday, April 25th at the ISB research facility in Seattle, Washington. This year's symposium will address the significant computational challenges in systems biology. Systems biology is a new field and is continually changing. These changes pose new computational challenges on an unprecedented scale. For example, it is predicted that within 10 to 15 years, we will be able to sequence individual human genomes for less than a $1000 each in less than a day. In North America alone, that translates to nearly half a billion human genomes which we will want to store and cross-link to medical records, and to analyze for susceptibility to diseases and responsiveness to medical interventions. The availability of large numbers of genome sequences also opens opportunities for decoding the information embedded in DNA: what is transcribed, under what conditions, and by how much? Such an endeavor will require comparisons of hundreds, possibly thousands, of genomes within and across species. It will also necessitate the integration of genomic data with large-scale expression, localization, and interaction data. The rate at which new types of data and larger data sets are being generated far exceeds the rate at which we are able to analyze and exploit these data, and the challenge is growing daily. These challenges are only the beginning: understanding the dynamic behavior of evolved systems demands new paradigms in model analysis and data visualization. How can we abstract from a system of thousands of interacting molecular species the underlying operational principles? Analogous to engineering design principles, we need to understand the functional and dynamic organizational principles of biomolecular networks. But, given the natural variability within cells over time, between cells within a tissue, and between individuals, how can we distinguish cause from effect, and essential from background/context? These and other challenges will be addressed at the symposium by a distinguished group of scientists, all experts in the field of computational biology. The Institute is anticipating approximately 250 attendees at the symposium and will begin at 4:00 pm on Sunday, April 24th with a keynote address from Nathan Myhrvold, Founder of Intellectual Ventures, LLC. -0- *T Other featured speakers include (in alphabetical order): Viktors Berstis Senior Software Engineer, IBM Global Services Rich Bonneau Senior Research Scientist, Institute for Systems Biology David Eisenberg Director, UCLA-DOE Lab of Biological Structure & Molecular Medicine, University of California Los Angeles Terry Gaasterland Professor of Computational Biology and Director, Scripps Genome Center, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego Mark Gerstein Albert L. Williams Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Molecular Biophysics/Biochemistry, and Computer Science, Yale University Trey Ideker Assistant Professor, Bioengineering, University of California San Diego Richard Karp Senior Research Scientist, International Computer Science Institute Joe Nadeau Co-director, Center for Computational Genomics, Case Western Reserve University Bernhard Palsson Professor of Bioengineering and Adjunct Professor of Medicine, University of California San Diego Mike Tyers Senior Investigator, The Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital TIME: Sunday, April 24, 2005 4:00 - 6:30 p.m. (PDT) Monday, April 25, 2005 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (PDT) VENUE: Institute for Systems Biology, 1441 N. 34th St., Seattle, WA REGISTRATION: www.systemsbiology.org (click on symposium icon) MEDIA CONTACT: Gretchen Sorensen Senior Director, External Affairs & Development 206-732-1239 gsorensen@systemsbiology.org