History of the Symposium Series

The care of injured or critically ill patients is a multidisciplinary endeavor that crosses traditional departmental and specialty lines and addresses pressing public health needs. Acute and critical care services require huge health care expenditures, although research on the issues faced by these patients is spread across multiple NIH components. On the functional genomics side, the massive amount of data generated by high-throughput technologies invites teamwork among medical specialties and quantitative researchers, including biostatisticians, mathematicians, computer scientists, and computational biologists. To focus attention on both the integrative demands of injury and critical care medicine and the need for close communication with experts in functional genomics, the NIH has sponsored a series of symposia on the Functional Genomics of Critical Illness and Injury, offering a forum for a diverse group of researchers to consider how high-throughput approaches to modern science can impact the practice of critical care and injury medicine.

To catalyze these important efforts, six years ago the Functional Genomics of Critical Illness and Injury symposium series was launched to facilitate education, consensus, and collaboration. The first two symposia, held April 4-6, 2002 and November 17-18, 2003, provided an educational forum for those interested in new, high-throughput technologies. The third symposium, held April 21-22, 2005, prioritized approaches for applying high-dimensional biotechnologies to the study of critically ill and injured patients. At the fourth conference, held November 13-14, 2006, participants reached consensus on the critical importance of large-scale collaborative studies to navigate the physiome. The fifth meeting focused on evaluating the cost-effectiveness of genome-wide association studies and creating the infrastructure to provide an acute and critical illness phenotype ontology. The last symposium focused on Epigenetics and Stress, New Technologies and Applications and Phenomics; The Role of Information Systems.

Links to Past Symposia

The Sixth Symposium
Functional Genomics of Critical Illness and Injury
November 17, 2008
Website: http://www.strategicresults.com/fg6

The Fifth Symposium
Functional Genomics of Critical Illness and Injury
Forging a Critical Alliance: Are We Meeting the Need?
November 14 - 15, 2007
Website: http://www.strategicresults.com/fg5

The Fourth Symposium
Functional Genomics of Critical Illness and Injury Surviving Stress: From Organ Systems to Molecules
November 13- 14, 2006
Web Site: http://www.strategicresults.com/fg4
Videocast: kindly scroll down to Symposium date http://videocast.nih.gov/PastEvents.asp?c=1&s=21

The Third Symposium
Functional Genomics of Critical Illness and Injury: Identifying Research Priorities
April 21 - 22, 2005
Web Site: http://www.strategicresults.com/fg3
Videocast: kindly scroll down to Symposium date http://videocast.nih.gov/PastEvents.asp?c=1&s=21
Environmental Health Perspectives article--news story http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/2005/113-12/focus1-abs.html

The Second Symposium
Functional Genomics of Critical Illness and Injury
November 17 - 18, 2003
Web Site: http://www.strategicresults.com/fg/
Videocast: kindly scroll down to Symposium date http://videocast.nih.gov/PastEvents.asp?c=1&s=71
JAMA article--news story
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/291/3/287

The First Symposium
Functional Genomics of Critical Illness and Injury
April 4 - 6, 2002
Videocast: http://videocast.nih.gov/PastEvents.asp?c=1&s=71
Consortium for Expression Profile Studies in Sepsis (CEPSIS)
Web Site: http://www.cia.wustl.edu/cepsis%20redirect.htm