Last year we held the first International Moesgaard Conference on Personalised Medicine, which I think was a great success with a lot of exciting presentations, discussions and inspiring interactions. We are planning to repeat this biennially and the organisation of the 2025 conference is already well underway with a reinforced organising committee at the wheel with a broader national representation, including new prominent members: Søren Brunak, Sisse Ostrowski, Mads Thomassen, and Tore Stage.

So, please mark your calendar for the second International Moesgaard Conference 4-5 November 2025. You can read more about the first international conference as well as our Annual Meeting  20 November 2024 in this newsletter.

I’d also like to flag the Nordic Conference on Future Medicine , September 10-12 in wonderful Trondheim, which is a joint meeting of the Nordic Society of Human Genetics and Precision Medicine (NSHG-PM) and the Nordic Biobank Network. There will also be an exciting preconference workshop on "AI, Data Science, and Genomics Applications" .

The Government and the Danish Regions share the vision of improving personalised medicine through increased use of genetics and health data, as stated in their new economy agreement for 2025. As part of this, the Regions will be responsible for running the associated analyses that requires supercomputing. AU’s national supercomputer GenomeDK was expanded massively last year and has ample capacity for meeting the increased needs at Region Midt (as well as at other Regions). You can read more about GenomeDK here. Shout-out to the superb GenomeDK team and the excellent collaboration with the MOMA bioinformatics and personalized medicine team!

Yonglun Luo (Alun), Biomedicine and Steno Diabetes Center, and Lingzhao Fang, Center for Quantitative Genetics and Genomics, co-organised a visit at AU by Nature Genetics Senior Editor Michael Fletcher, featuring seminars and several small meetings with individual researchers. The visit was very infomative and inspiring and I’m sure it has increased the awareness at Nat Genet of the awesome research here and will facilitate future publications in the journal. Big thanks to Michael and the organisers!

Last week Biomedicine had a Research Review Panel visit as part of the department’s evaluation proces. The Review Panel comprised of five international and national prominent scientists and research leaders, chaired by Professor Kristian Helin, The Institute of Cancer Research, London. The Personalised Medicine Research Theme at Biomedicine had a focused meeting with the Review Panel and both during that session and in the general feed-back session, we were praised for excellent research and received several insightful and valuable comments that I believe are relevant for our future work at Biomedicine and in our Network at large. Many thanks to the Panel! Biomedicine will inform more about the Review Panel visit soon.

Finally, I’m delighted to share exciting news on the launching of a new Pioneer Centre anchored at AU’s National Centre for Register Research (NCRR): the SMARTbiomed Pioneer Centre on statistical and computational methods to advance research translation for biomedicine in a range of diseases and disorders. The centre is a collaboration between researchers at Danish Universities/institutes and the University of Oxford, and the program includes several components relevant to personalised medicine. Naomi Wray, University of Oxford and NCRR, is Centre Director and Preben Bo Mortensen and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, both at NCRR, are among the Co-Directors. Naomi Wray was recently appointed parttime Professor at NCRR. A warm welcome to Naomi and big congratulations to Naomi, Preben, Bjarni and all involved!

You can read more about SMARTbiomed here and in this newsletter. Also note that the Centre has already launched the first wave of job postings as recently circulated in our Network.

Have a great summer!

Anders Børglum