Closing The Genome Research - Precision Medicine Gap

Host: Professor Graham Mann

Abstract

General anaesthesia changed the course of medicine as it allowed surgeries to be performed on unconscious patients, via a wide variety of lipophilic drugs. How our consciousness can be so uniformly switched off with such a diverse range of molecules remains a mystery. Fully understanding a complex phenomenon such as general anaesthesia requires linking different levels of research: from local molecular effects at the synapse to brain-wide consequences in behaving animals. I’ll be discussing new approaches in single molecule tracking and whole brain imaging in Drosophila melanogaster, which are helping us understand how general anaesthetics might work to render animals inert and unresponsive. I will also discuss how uncovering mechanisms of general anaesthesia in different animals might inform our understanding of the evolution of subjective awareness and consciousness.

Biography

Warren Kaplan is the Science Lead for Genomics and Biomedical Data at NCI Australia. He leads the computational medicine pillar at NCI, where key projects include the $185 million Precision Oncology Screening Platform Enabling Clinical Trials (PrOSPeCT) and the building of Australia’s National Genomics Archive. After completing a structural biology PhD at Wits University in 1998, he joined Entigen (a bioinformatics start-up company) where he worked as a molecular modeller and bioinformatics programmer. He moved to the Garvan Institute of Medical Research as bioinformatics hire number one in 2002 and in his 20 years at Garvan ran the Peter Wills Bioinformatics Centre, was appointed to the roles of Chief of Informatics and subsequently Head of the Data Sciences Platform that worked in the areas of production workflows, application development and High-Performance Computing and Big Data infrastructure.