Confirmed invited speakers:
Martin van den Berg, University of Utrecht, Netherlands
Gabriele Cruciani, University of Perugia, Italy
William Goddard, Caltech, USA
Gerhard Klebe, Phillips-University Marburg, Germany
Yvonne Martin, Abbot Laboratories, USA
Jeremy Nicholson, Imperial College, United Kingdom
Ann Richard, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), USA
Rebecca Wade, EMBL, Germany
Jia Wei, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Svante Wold, Umeå University & Umetrics
David Winkler, CSIRO Molecular and Health Technologies, Australia
David Salt, University of Portsmouth, UK

Scientific description
QSAR: Quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR) represent an attempt to quantitatively correlate structural or property descriptors of compounds with activity. Physicochemical descriptors such as hydrophobicity, topology, electronic properties, steric effects, etc are determined empirically or by computational methods. Activities used in QSAR include biological activity and chemical reactivity; these are applied in disciplines such as drug design and environmental risk assessment. QSAR can then be used for prediction of response of new chemical structures.

Omics technologies: Sequencing of the human genome has revolutionized biology and led to a variety of omics technologies and bioinformatics tools enabling us to study the expression of genes, proteins, metabolites, and more. The word omics refers to the comprehensive analysis of a defined biological system, where for example proteomics aim at analysing all proteins of a well-defined system. Other types of omics are for example metabolomics, genomics, lipidomics and transcriptomics. Omics technologies both have an impact on our understanding of biological processes, and are valuable tools in biomarker discovery.

Systems Biology: Systems biology means holistic modelling of a biological system to describe all the processes in a cell or organism and how they interact. This is a highly interdisciplinary process which is both experimental and computational, and include knowledge from the fields biology, computer simulations, statistics (bioinformatics), automatic control engineering, physics, mathematics, chemistry, and medicine.