The future of biomarker development in rare disease

CNS Biomarkers. In the last two days, our team attended the Workshop for Multimodal Biomarkers in CNS Disorders held at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington, DC. This conference provided a needed review of the current state of multimodal biomarker discovery and development. While most of the speakers focused on more common CNS disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and neuropsychiatric disorders, there stands to be important lessons that can be translated into the rare disease field. Here is what we learned about the clinical utility of biomarkers and their potential as we move towards precision medicine in rare disease.

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AES 2018 Recap: The Epilepsy Community Invades the Big Easy

NOLA.The American Epilepsy Society (AES) has wrapped up its annual meeting, which was held this year in New Orleans. AES is the largest meeting of epilepsy professionals working in clinical practice, academia, industry, and advocacy. It is a meeting I always look forward to as an opportunity to connect with friends and colleagues from across the world. As we all pack away our beads and digest our beignets, I would like to reflect on some of the major messages I, as an epilepsy genetics clinician and researcher, took away from this year’s AES annual meeting. Continue reading

The 2018 neurological phenotyping course for systems genetics – an invitation to Luxembourg

Computational phenotypes. Clinical epilepsy research requires the capturing of complex information in a way that then can be subjected to statistical analysis. For the analysis on the phenotype level, new standards are emerging that are heavily informed by genetic studies. In fact, in addition to the known domain-specific classifications such as the ILAE classification for epilepsy, interdisciplinary action is often required to improve the classification of neurological syndromes for a larger analysis. During the upcoming EMBO Practical phenotyping course in Luxembourg, we will introduce trainees in the field to concepts like the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO), a controlled vocabulary to characterize syndromes and one of pillars of research in complex syndromes such as epilepsy and how to address aspects not covered in HPO. The course will be held in Luxembourg from Oct 4 to Oct 10, 2018. There has already been a strong interest in this course, but we have a few spots left if you would like to register!

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The Focal Epilepsy Conference 2017 – an invitation to the Faroe Islands

Retreat. Part of the Kingdom of Denmark, the Faroe Islands are an archipelago between the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic halfway between Norway and Iceland. From May 24 to 26, 2017, the international epilepsy community will retreat to the Faroe Islands for a conference on the mechanisms of focal epilepsies. With this post, I am inviting clinicians and scientists who typically read our blog to this meeting. Take a quick glance at the program and you will understand why I think that this meeting is interesting. In 2017, a conference on the mechanisms of focal epilepsy has become a conference with a main focus on genetic mechanisms. Here is how our perception of the genetics of focal epilepsies changed over the last 18 years and why a trip to the middle of the North Atlantic may be worthwhile for you. Continue reading

We want you to be an Epilepsiome builder

YESTI. On behalf of the ILAE Genetics Commission, we are looking for young clinician scientists who would like to help us build the Epilepsiome – a comprehensive, up-to-date database on epilepsy and genes. We are looking for YESTI’s – “young experts with sufficient time and interest”. Read more about what we would expect from you. Continue reading

A look back at the Leuven NGS bioinformatics meeting

Program completed. On Sunday, we finished our EuroEPINOMICS next generation sequencing (NGS) bioinformatics meeting. After working through the command line, running scripts, and staring at black screens with white cursors, we completed our four day course by looking at the more user friendly, web-based tools that the NGS world has to offer, including Galaxy, Varbank, and Ingenuity. I think it was the general consensus among the participants that this was the bioinformatics meeting that we needed in order to understand the data that we generate and deal with on day-to-day basis. These were my favorite sound bites of our meeting. Continue reading

9 things you didn’t know about bioinformatics

Lessons. Today was the first day of our bioinformatics workshop in Leuven, Belgium. We started out with some basic command line programming and eventually moved on to working with R Studio. What is this all about? It’s about getting some basic understanding of what your computer does and how your computer handles files. It’s about good data and bad data and losing the fear of the command line. We collected responses from the participants today about today’s take home messages. Continue reading

Program or be programmed – the EuroEPINOMICS bioinformatics workshop 2014

Join the genome hacking league.  We are preparing a EuroEPINOMICS bioinformatics workshop in Leuven and I really, really encourage you to join us, as there are handful of place left. This will be the workshop that I always wanted to attend, but never got a chance to take part in. And yes, there is a final exam, but there is a chance that you might pass it.  If you’re worried, skip ahead two paragraphs.

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Chutzpah, Zen and Fahrvernügen – the 2013 Sde Boker workshop

Desert Dessert. Cold temperatures, streets closed because of snow – this is not what you expect when traveling to Israel. You also do not expect to have the chance to taste traditional Bedouin food and to see a beautiful canyon every morning. The biggest surprise is that you do not expect this during a workshop. From Dec 12-15th, the European epilepsy genetic community gathered in Be’er Sheva and Sde Boker, Israel for a combined epilepsy genetics workshop and a Young Researcher Meeting. This is a brief attempt to capture the atmosphere of this workshop for everybody who could not attend. By the way, “desert dessert” is a port wine produced in the Negev desert.

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