FCHealth meeting brings researchers together under the topic of drug resistance

The meeting of the FCHealth (Foundations of Computational Health) research programme of Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) was held on 6 February 2018 in Biomedicum Helsinki, and it brought together nearly 40 scientists from 12 different research groups. This time, the meeting addressed an important topic of drug resistance which remains a major barrier to the successful translation of cancer research into clinical practice. Effective clinical approaches that could reduce or overcome drug resistance are therefore urgently needed.

The day started with two keynote talks from internationally recognized experts in the field, Dr. Francesco Iorio (Wellcome Sanger Institute, United Kingdom) and Prof. Jukka Westermarck (University of Turku, Finland), providing the audience with great insights into existing challenges as well as both computational and experimental approaches towards understanding and tackling mechanisms underlying drug resistance in cancer and providing therapeutic biomarkers. The talks were followed by three parallel brainstorming sessions on (i) evolution of resistance to cancer therapy, (ii) available data sources for resistance modelling, and (iii) machine learning methods for drug resistance prediction.

The FCHealth programme of HIIT aims to solve hard computational challenges faced upon the emerging digitalization and wide adoption of data-driven approaches in healthcare. In particular, the objective is to combine state-of-the-art computational methods with large-real world data arising in healthcare and personalized medicine, analysed in collaboration with experts from Aalto University, University of Helsinki, Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS) as well as Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM).