Bioinformatics plays a key role in life sciences and clinical sciences. Research is now throwing up game-changing results that can be fed into clinical practice. Several hospitals, in fact, have begun to phase bioinformatics into their habitual activities, sometimes by means of creating bioinformatics units. These units offer bioinformatics services to various medical departments such as oncology, hematology and microbiology.

GMV has participated in the event “Bioinformatics as an innovation driver” held in the Madrid head office of the National Oncological Research Center (Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas: CNIO). Alfonso Valencia, Director of the Biocomputing and Structural Biology syllabus of the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológica, explained the importance of creating a major strategic, Europe-wide infrastructure to support life-science projects.

Rafael Navajo, GMV’s Head of Healthcare Business Development, participated with a paper on “Mining medical records”, stressing the importance and complexity of mining clinical information and BIG DATA technology, delving into the different phases involved in rolling out a solution of this type. Drawing on GMV’s experience in several Big Data projects, he outlined the challenges faced and the benefits to be obtained from solutions of this type.

The various interventions addressed the role of bioinformatics from the industry’s perspective and the clinical and research angle, underlining the strategic character of the European initiative ELIXIR within the management of genomic data in life sciences.