Adrian Turjanski

Recent advances in genome sequencing, delivering data cheaper and faster every year, together with new bioinformatics algorithms, artificial intelligence and big data promise a new era of personalized medicine. As the DNA of more and more people is being obtained, the bottleneck for a truly genomics era in healthcare is that data needs to be transformed into valuable information. Latin America is lying behind and a new paradigm in preventive medicine and wellness needs the development of new DNA tests directed to the consumer. In this sense translational bioinformatics is a key field that needs to be developed and implemented to have reliable storage, analytic and interpretive methods to optimize the transformation of these increasingly voluminous genomic data, into proactive, predictive, preventive, and participatory health. In this talk I will describe our efforts in developing tests and a bioinformatic platform to analyze patients' genomics information to help people live better and longer lives.

Adrián Turjanski obtained his Master degree in Chemistry from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina in 1999, and then his PhD in Biophysics in 2003. He conducted postdoctoral studies in the area of molecular modeling from 2003 to 2005 in the Department of Physiology and Molecular Biology, School of Sciences, University of Buenos Aires. He then conducted postdoctoral work in Bioinformatics as a 2005 Pew Latin American Fellow in the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research at the National Institutes of Health. Bethesda, MD,USA. In 2008 he returned to Argentina where he is in charge of the Structural Bioinformatics Lab, in the school of sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. He is part of the research staff of the National Research and Technology Council (CONICET) and Full Professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Buenos Aires since 2008. In 2013 he became director of the Argentinian Bioinformatic Platform and in 2015-2019 he was appointed Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Sciences, of the Ministry of Sciences. His research is focused in the developing and application of Bioinformatics tools for genomics, going from the genome to structural characterizations of proteins. In 2015 he co-founded BITGENIA, a precision medicine company. He is also one of the leaders of the Argentinian precision Medicine Initiative.