Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI) organised the Genome Tri-Conference held earlier this month from 3-9 March. This is an annual meeting, which started eight years ago, and is the Institute's premier event in their Genome Series. The event has evolved from a single conference into one of the most highly regarded genomic events of the year.

This year's meeting explored new trends and ideas in genomic medicine. As gene databases are mined, numerous targets for diagnostic and therapeutic exploration have amassed. To take advantage of these discoveries and provide answers in the quest for new products, the deployment of sophisticated technologies is required. The tri-conference was able to address these emerging genomic technologies by running three meetings back-to-back over a week. Emerging and early-stage companies interested in discussing collaborations made presentations at the opening meeting “Genomic Partnering”; the commercial implications of new and established techniques were presented at the second, 3-day, conference “Human Genome Discovery"; recent developments in the field of “Gene Functional Analysis” were presented during the third, closing, session of the meeting.

Featured topics at the tri-conference included high throughput methods, chemical genomics, microarray applications, genotyping and proteomics. The use of genomic information to design better drugs was also discussed.

For further details of the conference programme and speakers visit the Genome 2001 Tri-Conference web site.

Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI) was established in California, USA, in 1992 to act as information resource for the biotechnical and biomedical markets. They disseminate information about the latest technological developments in genomics, drug discovery and development, and lab instrumentation by organising scientific conferences and publishing market reports. Over 50 US and international events are held each year to facilitate interaction with key decision makers from leading pharmaceutical companies, biotech organisations, and academic institutions. They also produce a Genomic Reports series which provides business and technical professionals with in-depth market reports covering advances in the genomics field.