3 Day International Conference on NGBT Inaugurated at Hyderabad– “Will bring together thought leaders in life sciences and genomics”

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Punekar News's photo.Hyderabad, 01st October 2015 – SciGenom Research Foundation (SGRF) and its co-hosts – Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), and Institute of Bioinformatics (IOB) inaugurated the 2015 NextGen Genomics, Biology, Bioinformatics and Technologies (NGBT) Conference at Hyderabad International Convention Center (HICC), Hyderabad, India. The inauguration function was presided over by Ch. Mohan Rao, Director, CCMB. Other speakers included Dr George Thomas, Director, SciGenom Research Foundation, Dr Sekar Seshagiri, 2015 NGBT Conference Chair and Dr Thangaraj, Group Leader, CCMB.

The conference features various sponsors from the genomics and sequencing platform manufactures who are excited to partner with the largest genomics conference in the country bringing together the best of scientific minds and practitioners together. MedGenome, the leader in clinical genomics in India is a major sponsor for the event along with Illumina, the largest sequencing platform manufacturer in the world.

“The conference provides a platform to bring academia and industry in genomics and related technologies together” Mr Sam Santhosh, CEO, MedGenome opined “As a leader in genomics-based diagnostics in India and a pioneer in genomics-based research, we are happy that the NGBT conference has grown to become the largest genomics conference in the country”.

Other sponsors include Roche, IDT, Quintiles, EMC2 , Thermofisher, Qiagen, Agilent Technologies, Biospectrum, Affymetrix, Center for Commercialization of Anitbodies and Biologics, ILS and Nanostring Technologies among others.

This is the Fifth edition of the international conference. The previous ones were at NIMHANS – Bangalore, IITM – Chennai, IGIB – Delhi and RGCB – Trivandrum. The 2014 NGBT at Bangalore saw participation from 500+ delegates with presentations from more than 80 speakers – international and national. The program for this year has more than 90 talks on various topics ranging from medical/plant/animal genomics to structural biology to oncogenic signalling and bioinformatics. The meeting will encompass 12 key note lectures from luminaries who have made significant contributions to their area of research.

The conference will further feature exciting developments in genomics technologies, and their applications in life sciences including human, plant and animal biology, drug discovery, clinical trials, and personalized therapy. The 3-day program will have speakers from renowned research institutes from across the globe. Some of the distinguished speakers at the meeting include Dr. Ch Mohan Rao, Director, CCMB, India, Prof. Vineeta Bal, India, Dr. Alfred Wittinghofer, Professor, Max Planck Institute, Germany, Prof. Dr.Ivan Dikic, Germany, Prof. Zvulun Elzar, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Isreal, Prof. Thomas Sommer, MDC-Berlin, Germany, Dr. Stephan C Schuster, Professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Dr. Andrew Peterson, Sr. Director, Genentech Inc., USA, Dr. Ramprasad VL, COO, MedGenome Inc., Bangalore, India, Dr. K Thangaraj, Group Leader, Centre for Cell and Molecular Biology (CCMB), India, Dr. V Mohan, President & Director, Madras Diabetes Research Foundation, India, Dr. Akhilesh Pandey, Professor, Johns Hopkins University, USA, Dr Stephen Turner, CTO, Pacific Biosciences, USA and Dr Sachdev Sidhu, University of Toronto, Canada. The conference will present an ecosystem for scientists and students to share their work, build new connections and explore collaborations.

Young scholars are encouraged to present their work as posters and an international panel of experts will judge their scholarship for awards sponsored by journals of repute including eLife, PLOS, FEBSJ and Journal of Cell Science. The conference will also feature a life sciences job fair in partnership with Monster, India, on Oct 1st 11am to 4pm. Young scientists will get an opportunity to obtain career advice as well as interact with prospective employers as part of this job fair.

The 2015 NGBT meeting will also demonstrate the state of sequencing technologies by the studying the oral metagenome from consenting participants in real time during the course of the meeting. Samples will be collected on Day 1 from 100 consenting participants, sequenced on Day 2 and analyzed and results presented on Day 3 of the conference.

About SGRF

SciGenom Research Foundation, a not-for-profit organization, is working to promote Science in India through research and education.

Currently the foundation is involved in a number of research initiatives that are typically not funded by government agencies, but identified as scientifically relevant and important in consultation with our scientific advisory board. We have on-going research activities spanning Agriculture, Animal health, Biodiversity, Genomics and Human Health. The ongoing projects include the study of genomics of colored rice, metagenomics of rivers in India, wild elephant viral disease genomics, tea looper biocontrol agent development, familial cancer genomics and human genome variation studies.

Visit http://sgrf.org.in/ for more details

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