This award, co-funded by the Catalyzing New International Collaboration and Smart Health programs, supports a workshop organized by Naphtali Rishe of Florida International University and Ann Liebschutz of the U.S.-Israel Science and Technology Foundation. The workshop on Knowledge Mining and Bioinformatics Techniques to Advance Personalized Diagnostics and Therapeutics is to be held in conjunction with the Up Close and Personalized - Personalized Medicine Congress in Florence, Italy, February 2012. The workshop will foster collaboration in the design and development of bioinformatics tools to analyze and process large quantities of clinical and genomic data. This topic is at the intersection of clinical data-mining, algorithms design and bioinformatics. As it is well known that one drug does not deliver the same results to all patients, this workshop seeks to spur international collaborations to enable identification of individual genetic differences affecting drug effectiveness, making possible personalized treatment plans that can both improve the quality of healthcare while reducing its cost.In particular, the workshop will seed collaborations between U.S., Israeli, Turkish and Palestinian scientists. Through the auspices of the Turkish Embassy and Israeli-Palestinian Science Organization, the workshop is intended to bring together a multidisciplinary group of scientists from the fields of computer science, pharmacology, neuroscience, public health, medical informatics and bioinformatics. These future endeavors will build on diverse areas of expertise and technologies in development to improve health care delivery internationally.
