Brendan Frey is Co-founder and CEO of Deep Genomics, a company that aims to develop machine learning technologies to transform precision medicine, genetic testing, diagnostics and the development of therapies. His group has published over a dozen papers in Science, Nature and Cell, and their most recent work on using deep learning to identify protein-DNA interactions was highlighted on the front cover Nature Biotechnology.

At the 2016 RE•WORK Deep Learning in Healthcare Summit in London, Brendan shared expertise on reprogramming the human genome and why AI is needed in genomics. View his presentation and slides in the video below.

Why Genomic Medicine Needs Deep Learning

We have figured out how to write to the genome using DNA editing, but we don't know what the outcomes of genetic modifications will be. This is called the "genotype-phenotype gap". To close the gap, we need to reverse-engineer the genetic code, which is very hard because biology is too complicated and noisy for human interpretation. Machine learning and super-human AI are needed.

The data? Six billion letters per genome, over six billion people on the planet: that’s a lot of genetic data. Using deep learning to make sense of that data is poised to transform all aspects of healthcare, including genetic testing, drug development, precision medicine, digital therapeutics and insurance. Despite the potential for huge benefits, deep learning experts working on genomic medicine face challenges that are quite different from those faced by experts working on image analysis, speech recognition, text processing and language translation. In this talk, Brendan describes these challenges and explores how they may be overcome.

Watch more video presentations on the RE•WORK video hub and our YouTube channel.

Brendan Frey will be speaking at the Deep Learning Summit in San Francisco on 26-27 January. Other speakers include Ilya Sutskever, Research Director at OpenAI; Lise Getoor, Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz; Naveen Rao, CEO & Co-Founder of Nervana Systems; Danny Lange, Head of Machine Learning at Uber; and Stefano Ermon, Assistant Professor at Stanford University.

Early Bird passes expire 7 October. Book your pass now on the website here.

You can also learn more about the medical applications of AI at the Deep Learning in Healthcare Summit, taking place in Boston and London. See the full events list here.