(2025) Genomics for Precision Oncology: Halifax, NS

This workshop is sponsored by the organizers of the Beatrice Hunter Cancer Research Institute Conference.

The research and healthcare ecosystem in Canada is heading towards precision medicine via genomics, and oncology is no exception. The current and next generation of cancer researchers must acquire the capacity to integrate bioinformatics into their projects, and oncologists must acquire bioinformatics literacy to effectively communicate with patients in the clinic. This hands-on workshop introduces participants to the essential concepts, workflows, and interpretation strategies used in clinical cancer genomics. The workshop will focus on applying bioinformatics to real-world oncology cases, with an emphasis on data manipulation, genome annotation, and the interpretation of genomic results as they relate to clinical outcomes.

This 1.5–day workshop will cover key bioinformatics concepts and tools required to analyze cancer genomic data through exercises and case studies.

• Participants will gain practical experience and skills to:
• Describe the key steps in a clinical bioinformatics workflow transforming raw data to interpretable results;
• Describe the purpose and best practices of the GATK toolkit;
• Identify and distinguish between common genomic file formats (e.g., FASTQ, BAM/SAM, VCF, BED);
• Perform basic data manipulation and quality control on genomic data;
• Compare and contrast somatic vs. germline variant calling strategies, and;
• Apply interpretation strategies to real-world clinical case studies.

This workshop is intended for clinical researchers, researcher scientists, post–doctoral fellows, and graduate students with cancer genomics research projects.

You will require your own laptop computer. Minimum requirements: 1024×768 screen resolution, 1.5GHz CPU, 8GB RAM, 10GB free disk space, recent versions of Windows, Mac OS X or Linux (Most computers purchased in the past 3-4 years likely meet these requirements).

This workshop requires participants to complete pre-workshop tasks and readings.