C4IR in Serbia: Storage and analysis of genomic data

Dr Branislava Gemović, Centre for The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Serbia

Abstract: The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) in Serbia was established in February 2022, by the Government of the Republic of Serbia and the World Economic Forum, with two major fields of activities – biotechnology and the application of artificial intelligence in healthcare. The Centre is a part of the Office for IT and eGovernment and, as such, is involved in the building and strengthening national infrastructure resources for storage and analysis of the data such as genetic and biomedical data.

C4IR is coordinating two projects focused on genomic data and this talk will cover some of the activities. Current stage of development of the Platform for storage and sharing of genetic and biomedical data in Serbia will be presented, with a brief overview of the functional specification of the informational system. Secondly, a pilot project – DNA screening: sequencing for the prevention of cardiovascular and oncological diseases will be described and discussed. Both projects and other activities of the Centre greatly involve Serbian bioinformatics community and strengthening this community is one of the important roles of the Centre, therefore the discussion about the strategy for this is one of the aims of this lecture.

Biography: Branislava Gemović is a project manager at the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in charge of preparation and coordination of projects in the field of artificial intelligence and biotechnology. She is also employed at the Vinča Institute of Nuclear Sciences, University of Belgrade, and as a lecturer at the Faculty of Stomatology Pančevo.

Branislava has a Ph.D. in biology and more than ten years of experience in scientific research in the field of bioinformatics and computational biology. She has participated in a number of research efforts related to the use of machine learning in biomedicine, resulting in bioinformatics software tools. At the moment, her major focus is on the development of the Platform for storage and sharing of genetic and biomedical data in Serbia.