We’d like to thank everyone for another great meeting on April 1st: the speakers, our sponsors (especially our new sponsor, the McGill Department of Human Genetics), the attendees, and all the people working behind the scenes to ensure MonBUG’s success.
We’re working on our next meeting in May. 🙂
We’re also going to have some exciting announcements about new sponsors shortly!
The bar has been set high for the level of the talks during our first two meetings in 2015.
We think we’ll be able to follow up with some equally great speakers in May.
We’ll be confirming the data and the list of speakers in the next week or two.
Stay tuned!
The bigger auditorium got positive reviews, so that will now be our default room.
We have space for 150, so don’t be shy about inviting all your colleagues and friends to come.
We deliberately keep our meetings short, but everyone is welcome to stay after the meeting to continue the discussion around some drinks and food.
Again, thank you to all our speakers, and our new sponsor, the McGill Department of Human Genetics.
We’ve left the agenda for the April meeting below, but we’ll be posting the agenda for the May meeting shortly.
Agenda for April 1st meeting (May meeting agenda to be posted shortly)
4:00 PM
Introduction and open floor for announcements/questions/comments – Alexis Blanchet-Cohen, IRCM
4:15 PM
“Personalized Targeted Therapy for Refractory Childhood Cancers” – Mathieu Lajoie, PhD, CHU Ste-Justine
5:00 PM
Break (Snacks and beverages)
5:15 PM
“PyGeno: A Python package for Personalized Medicine and Proteogenomics” – Tariq Daouda, IRIC
5:45 PM
“Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Git” – Nicolas De Jay, Lady Davis Institute
—
You can let us know you’re coming by RSVP, sending us an email at info[@]monbug.ca, or by any other means, as long as we know that you will be attending the meeting.
We’re always looking for new speakers, of all levels: keynote speakers, short presentations about your favourite programming library or tool, …
Please contact us if you would like to present.
—
Abstract for the keynote presentation
“In Canada, about 1500 pediatric cancers are diagnosed each year. Despite improvements in risk-based treatment protocols, ~20% of childhood cancer patients do not respond to current therapies and ultimately succumb to their disease, urging the need for new and more effective therapeutic approaches. Since individual tumours of the same clinical type harbour diverse sets of genomic alterations that drive oncogenesis and modulate drug response, personalized targeted therapy based on next generation sequencing may be a key to increase curerates and decrease treatment-related morbidity and mortality.
In this project, we implemented an automated pipeline to identify single nucleotide variants, indels, gene fusions, and copy number variations from DNA and RNA sequencing data. We use Perl wrappers to encapsulate well-established softwares (e.g. Bowtie2, STAR, PicardTools) and connect them using a common interface. Our goal is to detect prognostic markers and drug-actionable targets in a rapid and standardized way, going from biopsy to detailed tumour analysis within a clinically-relevant timeframe. Actionable variations are validated by re-sequencing or qPCR, detailed in a report with supportive information and communicated to the physician. Preliminary results on 10 cases indicate the feasibility and great potential of our approach; indeed, the final report can be in the treating oncologist’s hands in less than 8 weeks. This represents a first step towards the implementation of a targeted therapy program for children with relapse or refractory cancer.”