C2B2/MAGNet News & Announcements
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- Jun 2008 News
- C2B2 receives technical achievements awards
- June 25 2008
- At the 2008 Annual Meeting of the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG™) initiative, members of the C2B2 software development team were recognized with awards for their technical achievements and contributions to the program, including their work in defining standards for the execution of bioinformatics workflows on caGrid (the grid infrastructure of caBIG) and in interfacing caGrid with TeraGrid, one of the largest national computational grid networks.
- C2B2 awarded caBIG Knowledge Center
- June 02 2008
C2B2, in collaboration with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has a received a 3-year award from the National Cancer Institute to establish and operate the Molecular Analysis Tools Knowledge Center of the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG™) initiative. The mission of the Knowledge Center is to promote the adoption of caBIG™ technologies aiming to facilitate the discovery of the next generation of cancer diagnostics and therapeutics which will help realize the vision of molecular and personalized medicine. geWorkbench, a bioinformatics platform developed by C2B2 in the context of the National Center for the Multiscale Analysis of Genomic and Cellular Networks (MAGNet), will be one of the tools supported by the Knowledge Center.
The caBIG™ initiative, overseen by the NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology, was conceived to advance basic and clinical research on cancer and improve clinical outcomes for patients. Information such as patient registries, tissue management data, and study results can be uploaded to the grid-based system.
- Dec 2007 News
- Barry Honig inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- December 17 2007
- Barry Honig, PhD, professor of biochemistry & molecular biophysics and Director of C2B2, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in an October 6 ceremony in Cambridge, Mass. The Academy is an independent research center conducting multidisciplinary studies of problems in science, technology, and global security; social policy and American institutions; the humanities and culture; and education.
- Sep 2007 News
- C2B2 Hosts Large Genotyping Database for Adverse Drug Reactions
- September 28 2007
- C2B2 has been awarded a contract to serve as the Data Analysis and Coordination Center for the International Serious Adverse Event Consortium (SAEC). The SAEC is a nonprofit organization comprised of leading pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions with scientific and strategic input from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Using the power of whole genome association (WGA) studies, the SAEC aims to (i) identify and validate DNA-variants useful in predicting the risk of drug-related serious adverse events, and (ii) make such discoveries freely available to the research community for further investigations. C2B2 will provide computational infrastructure for the storage and analysis of the WGA data as well as information systems for the dissemination of the analysis results to the public.
- Dana Pe'er Receives 2007 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award
- September 19 2007
- Dana Pe'er has been presented with the 2007 NIH Director's New Innovator Award ( http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/sep2007/od-18a.htm ). Part of an NIH Roadmap for Medical Research initiative, this award recognizes outstanding scientists who are "well-positioned to make significant — and potentially transformative — discoveries in a variety of areas”.
This award, proposed by NIH Director, Elias A. Zerhoni, M.D. was created to help new scientists fund highly innovative approaches to major research challenges that could lead to significant medical advances.
Dr. Pe'er is assistant professor of biological sciences at Columbia University, a member of the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and an investigator at the MAGNet Center. She utilizes computational and biotechnology approaches to understand how a cell’s regulatory network processes signals and how the signal processing goes wrong in cancer. - 2nd Annual DREAM Conference
- September 19 2007
- The 2nd Annual DREAM ( Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods ) conference has been announced and will be held December 3 and 4, 2007 at the New York Academy of Sciences in New York, NY.
The conference will feature several speakers including: Tim Gardner, Ravi Iyengar, Fritz Roth, Chris Sander, Ron Shamir, Ilya Shmulevich, Mike Snyder, Peter Sorger, Ioannis Xenarios; as well as a presentation of accepted papers.
Also to be discussed will be the DREAM Challenge, which consists of 5 separate challenges composed of one or more datasets which participants used to generate predictions as to the best possible network from which the data originated. All predictions and results will be disclosed at the conference.
For more information please visit the DREAM Conference Website. - Jun 2007 News
- 2007 C2B2/MAGNet Annual Retreat
- June 04 2007
- The 2007 annual C2B2/MAGNet Center retreat took place on April 6, at Wave Hill (http://wavehill.org) in New York city. Several of the Center's faculty members had the opportunity topresent and inform the C2B2/MAGNet community about the ongoing research in their laboratories. Presentations from the meeting are available online at: http://magnet.c2b2.columbia.edu/retreats/07/.
- Feb 2007 News
- Prof. Dana Pe'er joins C2B2
- February 21 2007
- Dana Pe'er, Assistant Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, has joined C2B2. Prof. Pe'er's research focuses on understanding the organization, function and evolution of molecular networks. Molecular networks sense multiple signals from the environment, robustly process appropriate cellular responses and orchestrate the regulation of hundreds of genes and proteins to execute these responses. This remarkable functionality occurs through diverse mechanisms including regulation of transcription, epigenetic changes, translation, degradation, post-translational signaling, and localization. Prof. Pe'er's lab develops computational methods to integrate diverse high throughput data and unravel a holistic systems level view of the cell in an attempt to answer such questions as: How does this calculation differ between cell-type, individual and species? How do small changes to the regulatory network propagate and manifest in phenotypic diversity and changes? What is the connection between regulation and fitness? How does dysfunctional regulation lead to disease such as cancer?
Prof. Pe'er is a graduate of the Hebrew University. Before joining Columbia in 2006 she held a Research fellow appointment at George Church's lab, Dept. of Genetics, Harvard Medical School - Prof. Itsik Pe'er joins C2B2
- February 20 2007
- Itsik Pe'er, Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, has joined C2B2. Prof. Pe'er develops and applies novel computational methods in human genetics, answering questions such as: How is it best to measure, describe and quantify differences between individual DNA sequences? How does sequence variation affect biological processes? How can we use it to understand and influence human disease? All these questions pose complex analytical challenges, with direct impact on medical research. Some of Prof. Pe'er's specific interests include the study of genetics in special populations that underwent bottleneck and admixture events, the development of an information processing framework for most people having their genome on a disk, and the interplay between somatic and germline variation.
Prof. Pe’er is a graduate of Tel Aviv University, where he received his B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees. He did postdoctoral research at the Department of Molecular genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science and then jointly at the Broad Institute, Whitehead Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. - C2B2 software wins award
- February 08 2007
- geWorkbench, an advanced Java-based platform for integrated genomics developed by C2B2 investigators with funding from the NIH roadmap and the National Cancer Institute, was recognized with an excellence award during the 2007 annual meeting of the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) initiative. The geWorkbench project team was cited for "excellence in the design, planning and implementation of one of the first unrestricted open-source software projects from integrative genomics analysis".