"Observational data for biomedical discovery"

Join the UB Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in welcoming Nicholas P. Tatonetti, PhD, Herbert Irving Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University and chair of the 2018 AMIA Translational Bioinformatics Summit, for a talk titled: "Observational data for biomedical discovery."

Observation is the starting point of discovery. Based on observations, scientists form hypotheses that are then tested. In the information age, trillions of observations are being made and recorded every day – from online social interactions to the emergency room visit. With so much data available, generating hypotheses using a single scientist’s mind is no longer sufficient.

Data mining is about training algorithms to recognize patterns in enormous sets of data and automatically identify new hypotheses. In this talk, I will discuss how we use data mining algorithms to identify unexpected effects of drugs used singly and in combination with other drugs. Using integrative informatics methods, we are able to discover drug-drug interactions that no one considered possible before.

Finally, I will demonstrate how to use simple and efficient laboratory experiments to validate these hypotheses. In many cases these experiments can be executed in high-throughput by robotic systems, with the ultimate goal of automating the scientific method.

Jessica Reynolds, PhD
Email: jlr8@buffalo.edu