WELCOME
Dear Colleague:
The National Institutes of Health is pleased to invite you to the fifth annual symposium on the Functional Genomics of Critical Illness and Injury, to be held November 14th and 15th, 2007 at the Natcher Conference Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.
Investigators using genomic and proteomic approaches to study injury and critical illness face major challenges unique to these methods regarding resources, experimental design, and data analysis. Human studies in critically ill or injured patients have special requirements related to safety, vulnerability, and privacy, while genomic research itself raises additional ethical considerations. It is clear that multi-institutional efforts are needed to provide the organizational and investigative framework necessary to optimize resource utilization and data accrual for functional genomics studies of critical illness and injury.
The objectives of these yearly symposia are three-fold: i) offering educational presentations; ii) seeking consensus on key scientific goals; and iii) encouraging collaboration to achieve those goals. The first two symposia provided an educational forum on new high-throughput technologies, systems biology, computational biology, and bioinformatics. The third symposium reached consensus on the value of applying high-dimensional biotechnologies to the study of critically ill and injured patients. The fourth symposium addressed systems approaches to the investigation of pathophysiology and the concomitant need for establishing multidisciplinary research networks to conduct such studies.
This symposium series is a unique opportunity for communication and collaboration among the diverse fields committed to applying lessons from functional genomics at the bedside of critically ill and injured patients. We look forward to welcoming you to Bethesda this November.
Sincerely,
The Organizing Committee
J. Perren Cobb, M.D.
Center for Critical Illness and Health Engineering
Washington University in St. Louis
St. Louis, MO
Anthony F. Suffredini, M.D.
Critical Care Medicine Department
NIH Clinical Center, DHHS
Bethesda, MD
Robert L. Danner, M.D.
Critical Care Medicine Department
NIH Clinical Center, DHHS
Bethesda, MD
Peter Munson, Ph.D.
Center for Information Technology
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD
Scott Somers, Ph.D.
National Institute of General Medical Sciences
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD
Ramona Hicks, Ph.D.
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD
Andrea Harabin, Ph.D.
National Heart Lung and Blood Institute
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD