[Music]
Today is the first day of the FDA Scientific Computing Days. It's a two-day
symposium where all of the divisions come together and present some of their work
where they use scientific computing to solve some regulatory or scientific
problems.
This event is important because of the opportunity it provides for scientists to
communicate to each other and thereby cross fertilize ideas.
It's just a phenomenal event both in terms of the speakers, the keynote speakers, and
in terms of the posters that are available and then the opportunity for breakout
sessions, which truly will provide an opportunity for people to be able to maybe
develop our collaborations, our sharing. And by doing collaborations, you don't
have an additive efficiency — you have a multiplicative efficiency.
Every time, after every conference like this, we start about five to ten different
collaborations. Even if one out of ten produces a significant result—for health
care people, that's great. Because that person whose health is going to be
impacted because of this communication is going to be your child, your mother —
somebody you love. So that's why it is important in science to get people
connected.
It's a very rare thing when you have all these scientists all in one room, in one
area where you can get to meet them, you can find out what they are doing, and
share your experiences, as well as how we could help each other.
At this point, I'm going to tie back to my title, which is like "How Can We As
Regulators Skate Towards Where the Puck Is Going?" It's been a mantra that, you
know, that some industry greats, really creative thinkers like Steve Jobs — it was
all predicated on this idea: We need to understand the consumer. We need to
understand the market. We need to understand where it's going. And we need
to make products that are going to match that. Kessler says patents not only
describe a specific invention, you know, what they're doing and why they are doing
it, but also it just broadly tells us, in the industry's own words, what they're
capable of, what they are working towards. We can use it to understand trends and
where the puck is going. I tied it all back together.
One of the things I'm also interested in is the vendor booths, because it's
interesting to see what new technology the vendors are able to bring to FDA to
help us with our mission.
I'm Dr. John Greene, I'm senior director of bioinformatics for CSRA Incorporated.
Today we are at the FDA Scientific Computing Days, where we have a booth
in hopes of being able to support FDA in its regulatory mission. We have a white
paper on precision medicine working with cancer for the National Cancer Institute
where we support one of the cancer genomic cloud pilots that are currently
running. We're partnered with the Institute for Systems Biology and Google.
And it's the kind of thing we'd like to take forward into other agencies of the
federal government, particularly within HHS, where the bulk of our business is.
My name is Karen Davenport and I'm from Los Alamos National Laboratory. My name
is Poe Li. I'm from Los Alamos National Lab. We're here to present EDGE
Bioinformatics as a platform available to biologists, microbiologists, who don't
have a lot of experience in bioinformatics, but this is a platform
that allows them to answer complex questions with next generation sequencing
data.
I'm Patrick Johnson. I'm head of corporate research at a French software company
called Dassault Systemes. And we had the pleasure to have our CEO doing the
keynote.
And the major idea I want to share with you today is that the virtual world is
the source of imagination. So we believe that the future of extreme knowledge is
experimentation in the virtual world. Because that's the shortest distance
between human brain and the phenomena.
It's a fantastic forum for us first because the networking with the people
that are basically framing regulatory and scientific regulatory domains and
decisions for the years to come. And so we feel very privileged to be part of
the FDA Days, and we want to be part of its mission.
I would just encourage anybody that's either in an office setting doing science
for FDA or scientific research, or just applications that are scientific in
nature to go ahead and attend and take a look at the different things that FDA is
doing.
This is an invaluable event, because without this, you really don't have the
opportunity to have at one spot in two days a full spectrum of the kinds of work
that's going on in the other Centers.