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Biography |
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Upon completion of her doctorate in Medical Biochemistry & Molecular Biology [Thesis titled “Biochemical Studies Based on Signal Transduction by C-erbB-2 gene Product”, Laboratory of Breast and Ovarian Cancer Biology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA.], Dr. Samar Kamal Kassim at Ain Shams Faculty of Medicine directed research in basic cancer research. This led to the publication of many articles in cancer diagnosis and follow up (Mansour et al, 2012, Eissa et al, 2011, Eissa et al, 2005, Kassim et al, 2004, Eissa et al, 2003 etc.) where she helped establishing detection systems for many epithelial cancers using tumor and genetic markers. At 2002, she joined Glasgow Caledonian University where she identified the differences between breast and ovarian cancers in the Androgen receptor gene methylation and exon one CAG repeat length (Kassim et al, 2004-2). Dr. Kassim also joined important research in molecular events accompanying hepatitis C viral infections among Egyptian patients, which led to the publications of many articles as (Hassan et al, 2007, and Hassan et al, 2002 etc.) She directed Bioinformatics research of breast cancer for the development of an Association system for breast cancer microarray (Darweesh et al, 2014). She also directed the presentation of An Ensemble Feature Extraction Classifier for the Analysis of Integrated Data of HCV-HCC Related DNA Microarray (Eid et al, 2014). This feature enables the prediction of hepatocellular carcinoma among chronic HCV infected patients. She published a large longitudinal study in the American Journal of Gastroenterology about the Host and viral determinants of the outcome of exposure to HCV infection genotype 4 (Kamal et al, 2014). Dr. Kassim helped the development of Bioinformatics Master and undergraduate programs in Helwan and Ain Shams Universities. She is the Co-PI of the Egyptian node of the H3ABioNet granted by the NIH through which published in Science (H3Africa consortium, 2014)”, Genome research (Mulder et al, 2015), and Global Heart (Mulder et al, 2017). She is the Co-Chair of the ECTWG of A3Africa since May 2016 till present. And shared in the development of recommended Bioinformatics curricula by H3ABioNet.
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Abstract |
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Open Data in Bioinformatics and Required Infrastructure Towards Achieving the SDGs |
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Biological and particularly molecular biology has undergone a technological revolution in the past two decades after the initial human genome sequence was published. The initial draft of the human genome took teams of international scientists ~13 years to sequence with an estimated cost of ~500 million US dollars.
Technological advances have reduced the time and cost of generating a whole human genome sequence to approximately USD 4,000 with 30 times coverage achievable in 1 day.
Globally Africa has a disproportionate burden of global of communicable (infectious) diseases with HIV, TB and malaria dominating research on the continent. Additionally, as living standards improve there is a rising prevalence of non-communicable diseases such as type II diabetes, cardio-vascular, hypertension and stroke.
To ensure that Africa and African populations are not left behind in this global revolution in genomics,, the NIH and Wellcome Trust with the African Society for Human Genetics initiated the H3Africa project which funds specific African based research projects dealing with African populations, health and diseases.
Bioinformatics deals with big data. Secure and accessible storage are vital for any data intensive science. Due to the data sizes, computational processing power with access to fast read and write and storage is fundamental for computing and storing results. Use of well-defined meta-data standards is a core tenant for sharing of data and making data open otherwise no one will understand your data. Cyber-infrastructure such as internet connectivity is vital for open data and data sharing to effected, especially in Africa where data if fundamental for discovery and solving of problems. Education of the next generation of technology users, data scientists, bioinformaticians will be needed to ensure that maximum use of data can be realized by African citizens to improve their quality of life. The most fundamental underpinning to the success of Open Data and Open science is the people aspect. Until African scientists embrace the idea of open data and open science whose concept is more mature in developed nations, no amount of infrastructure will facilitate the move to data sharing, Open Data and Open science.
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