Media Releases

World expert on machine learning and genomic medicine to speak at BizSkule

June 20, 2016

Sun­ny­vale, CA – Deep learn­ing will trans­form med­i­cine, but not in the way that many advo­cates think. Bio­log­i­cal com­plex­i­ty, rare muta­tions and con­found­ing fac­tors work against us, so that even if we sequence 100,000 genomes, it won’t be enough.

Bren­dan Frey is engi­neer­ing the future of per­son­al­ized med­i­cine. A pro­fes­sor in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toronto’s Fac­ul­ty of Applied Sci­ence & Engi­neer­ing, he and his research group com­bine world-lead­ing exper­tise in machine learn­ing with more than a decade of expe­ri­ence in genom­ic med­i­cine to teach com­put­ers to “read” and begin to make sense of the more than two-bil­lion base pairs that make up the human genome.

Frey is also CEO of Deep Genomics, a start­up that is invent­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of com­pu­ta­tion­al tech­nolo­gies that can tell us what will hap­pen with­in a cell when DNA is altered by genet­ic vari­a­tion, whether nat­ur­al or ther­a­peu­tic. Deep Genomics recent­ly secured $5 mil­lion in seed fund­ing.

On Thurs­day, June 23, Frey will be speak­ing at BizSkule, an event host­ed by U of T Engi­neer­ing that invites top thinkers to illu­mi­nate hot top­ics in engi­neer­ing, tech­nol­o­gy, indus­try and busi­ness — from the shar­ing econ­o­my to sports ana­lyt­ics, enter­tain­ment to the future of trans­porta­tion.

Mem­bers of the media are invit­ed to speak with Frey before or after his talk.