Dr. Gunaretnam Rajagopal

Plenary Speaker

Executive Director,
The Cancer Institute of New Jersey (RWJMS)
Cancer Informatics Core

Translational Bioinformatics - From the Bench to the Bedside and Back
General Session III, Friday, 9:00am - 11:00am, Amphitheater

Biography

Guna Rajagopal joined the Cancer Institute of New Jersey as its Executive Director of the Cancer Informatics Core (CIC), on September 4th 2007. The mission of the newly formed CIC is to develop and deploy state-of-the-art cyber-infrastructure and IT, clinical/bioinformatics support services as well as to conduct research in clinical/bio informatics and systems biology to advance biomedical research and its translation to the clinic. He heads a team that is working in partnership with basic scientists, clinicians and IT professionals within and outside the Cancer Institute of New Jersey (RWJMS) as they strive to eliminate the pain and suffering caused by cancer.

In his previous position, he was the founding Executive Director of the new Bioinformatics Institute (BII) at the Biopolis, Singapore (2001-2007). Prior to his appointment in Singapore, he spent twelve years at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. He was Assistant Director of Research in the Theory of Condensed Matter Group, Cavendish Laboratory

Abstract

Advances in biomedicine and its effective translation from the bench to the bedside (and back) requires the efficient and secure development and deployment of cyber-infrastructure (i.e. computing, network and storage platforms) in conjunction with analytic, and interpretive methods to optimize the integration and transformation of increasingly voluminous biomedical data from high-throughput experiments and Internet enabled medical devices.

This includes research on the development of novel techniques for the integration of biological and clinical data and the evolution of clinical informatics methodology to encompass biological observations. The end product is newly found knowledge from these integrative efforts that can be disseminated to a variety of stakeholders, including biomedical scientists, clinicians, and patients that is targeted towards the goal of realizing proactive, predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory health. In this talk, I will overview projects I have been involved in where the above issues have been addressed with some success. I will outline our plans to take it to the next level by working in partnership with academia and Industry in New Jersey to address data integration/mining challenges that form a barrier to linking bench and bedside.