Current and future research collaborations in genomic medicine between the University of Alabama at Birmingham and HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology will be the focus of the annual Center for Genomic Medicine Symposium on Wednesday, May 1. The symposium, sponsored by UAB and HudsonAlpha, will be held at the Jackson Center in Huntsville.
The keynote address will be presented by Marc S. Williams, M.D., director of the Geisinger Genomic Medicine Institute in Danville, Pennsylvania. Williams will talk about patient-centered precision health and the institute’s innovative approach to deploy genome sequencing to a large patient population.
Attendees will also learn about the Center for Genomic Medicine’s achievements over the past five years and plans for the future. The Alabama Genomic Health Initiative, one of the flagship collaborative projects between UAB and HudsonAlpha, has developed a database and biobank with more than 4,000 participants. Opportunities to leverage this resource to enable research on both rare and common disorders will be emphasized.
“I am most excited to hear how the various teams funded last year have developed new ways of using and visualizing AGHI data,” said Bruce R. Korf, M.D., Ph.D., chief genomics officer at UAB and co-director of the Alabama Genomic Health Initiative. “We will also be launching a new initiative aimed at piloting polygenic risk scores for the AGHI.”
The symposium is free and will include a tour of HudsonAlpha’s biotech campus. To register, visit the 2019 Annual Center for Genomic Medicine Symposium website.