Biography
Fiona is a bioinformatics scientist-turned entrepreneur. Having worked at Illumina developing tools for interpretation of next-generation sequencing data, Fiona realised the main bottleneck for genome interpretation and precision medicine is accessing the right data. Therefore, in 2013 Fiona founded DNAdigest as a charity to promote best practices for efficient and ethical data sharing, and in 2014, she co-founded Repositive to develop an online community platform and global exchange for genomic data. Fiona’s familiarity with the industry ensured that Repositive’s platforms would provide data access solutions while also respecting the industry's need for privacy, data governance and IP protection. This awareness was fundamental in securing £3M+ investment and support from early partners including AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, XenTech and Shanghai LIDE Biotech. Fiona features on the 2018 WISE100 list, an index of the UK’s 100 most inspiring and influential women in social enterprise.
The pharmaceutical industry is applying a data science approach combined with active machine learning in various areas which include the integration of experimental work and computational modeling, automation, big data analytics, and informatics. This session will focus on pharma preparations and applications of AI and Machine Learning across drug discovery and development. Various examples will demonstrate how pharma is harnessing the opportunity of large data sets to predict and improve translation of preclinical findings to the specific human disease conditions to be evaluated in clinical studies.