The Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI) will host a symposium on systems ‘Biology for Diabetes and Cancer: Towards Precision Medicine’ on 26 and 27 of this month.

Held at Qatar National Convention Centre, the symposium aims to bring together scientists from around the globe to share their experiences with students and other interested parties in Qatar.

During the opening ceremony, Dr Bernard Thorens from Centre for Integrative Genomics, Department of physiology, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, will deliver the keynote speech on ‘Mouse genetic, genomic, and physiology to uncover novel pathways controlling islet function. Dr Thomas Zachariah, executive vice-president, Qatar Foundation Research and Development, Dr Abdelali Haoudi, executive director, QBRI and Dr Philippe Froguel, senior scientific director, QBRI will also address the gathering during the opening session.

The symposium will cover precision medicine, an innovative approach to medicine which incorporates different research and patient data to better understand individual disease patterns, such as diabetes and cancer. During the two-day symposium, world’s leading scientists will respond to QBRI ideas and to contribute to formulating a path forward towards the creation of a meaningful genomic medicine and system biology research for diabetes and women’s cancer global network.

The major goals of the event are to shed light on new developments in genomic medicine for the understanding and innovative treatment of diabetes and cancer, to discuss opportunities for regional and global networks for type 2 diabetes and women’s cancer as well as to create a world-class strategic research programme for system biology approaches towards personalised medicine of diabetes and women’s cancer.

On the second day, there will be two workshops dealing with some major challenges in diabetes and cancer.

The first workshop will discuss System Biology in Diabetes: Challenges and Opportunities and the other one will discuss System Biology in Women’s Cancer: Challenges and Opportunities. During the workshops, Dr Philippe Froguel of QBRI will present a paper on the topic of the road towards personalised medicine in type 2 diabetes and Dr Jeremie Arash from QBRI will discuss the topic of the road towards personalised medicine in ovarian cancer.

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