Closing Workshop

General Information
Application
Schedule

General Information

Summary

We are convening a three-day workshop to explore novel approaches to the amelioration of infectious disease in the developing world through collective, open source and public efforts in computational biology and informatics. We will gather experts to help identify those scientific problems and approaches most susceptible to these methods, and the organization of public resources, the coordination of collective research efforts, and the dissemination of educational materials to address these critical problems. Our ultimate goal is to speed the development of drugs, vaccines and other therapeutic and prophylactic interventions where financial and market-based incentives are unlikely to lead to the desired results.

The meeting will consist of two days of working sessions and a one-day public symposium.

Background

The completion of the human genome project promises to usher in a new era of biomedical advancement, but the path from genome sequence to disease cure is complex and will require significant contributions from the mathematical and information sciences for its illumination. The time, energy and financial resources required to turn DNA sequences into disease cures is now invested most heavily into projects with high probability of monetary reward — cardio-vascular disease, cancer, and aging, for example. Infectious disease remains a major cause of premature death worldwide, but brings suffering disproportionately to people in the developing world. Relief from the scourges of malaria, schistosomiasis and leishmaniasis, for example, will not soon flow from market forces alone. The open source movement in software development provides a powerful paradigm for harnessing the power of collective intelligence for the solution of complex practical problems. We believe that infectious disease genomics can be effectively studied and utilized for the development of drugs and vaccines using similar methods. There will be, however, significant challenges. These challenges involve many social and legal issues, such as intellectual property rights, the appropriate assignment of credit and recognition for successes, the coordination of efforts, quality control and financial support. Our intent during this three day meeting is to determine the key scientific questions and research opportunities as well as the social, legal and policy challenges and develop strategies to address them. This is necessarily a broadly interdisciplinary effort. We seek to enlist the participation of key members of the scientific and medical communities as well as of the genomics, bioinformatics, computing and mathematical sciences communities to help lead the effort.

Organizers

Tom Kepler and Lindsay Cowell (Duke University Laboratory of Computational Immunology).

Arti Rai, Stephen Maurer, and Andrej Sali (Tropical Disease Initiative)

Sponsors

SAMSI, Duke Global Health, Duke Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

Application

Registration is closed.

Schedule

Sunday - May 22, 2005
Radison Hotel RTP, Room H (3rd Floor)

Monday - May 23, 2005
Radison Hotel RTP, Room H (3rd Floor)

Tuesday - May 24, 2005
Radison Hotel RTP, Room H (3rd Floor)

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