On October 14 -19 IDIBELL has hosted the 6th Annual DREAM on Reverse Engineering Challenges, the 7th Annual RECOMB Satellite on Systems Biology and the 8th Annual RECOMB on Regulatory Genomics, which were first held outside the U.S.

This year there has been the addition of a fourth conference: IDIBELL Conference on Cancer Informatics (RICCI), held at the same venue on October 15, 2011. The goal of this conference is to discuss the present and future research directions on bioinformatics and systems biology to better understand the mechanisms of carcinogenesis, with implications in prevention, prognosis and treatment.

Overall the four conferences have the goal to bring together computational and experimental scientists in the area of regulatory genomics and systems biology, to discuss current research directions, latest findings, and establish new collaborations towards a systems-level understanding of gene regulation, with particular emphasis on cancer.

These sessions have been coordinated by Miquel Angel Pujana, IDIBELL researcher (RICCI’s organizer), Andrea Califano, researcher at Columbia University, NY (RECOMB on systems biology

organizer ), Manolis Kellis, researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (RECOMB on Regulatory Genomics organizer) and Gustavo Stolovitzky, reseracher at IBM Research (DREAM organizer).