Meet the Clinical Bioinformaticians

In this video we meet Clinical Bioinformaticians. While they do not see patients clinical bioinformaticians are an essential part of the interpretation team.

Clinical bioinformaticians work to make genome data clinically actionable; to make sense of large amounts of data so that other healthcare professionals can use it to inform decisions about diagnosis, treatment and care. They straddle the worlds of biology and computer programming to provide a vital link in the patient pathway. They are collaborators and communicators, working with a large multi-disciplinary team and applying different techniques when considering each patient.

Professor Andy Brass, Dr Sirisha Hesketh, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Dr Anthony Underwood and Eileen Gallagher showcase what the work of a clinical bioinformatician involves, the kind of traits and skills required, and some of the challenges facing both those working in the profession and the NHS more broadly.

They introduce the field of clinical bioinformatics, and explain:

• the vital importance of bioinformatics to sift through large amounts of genome data and home in on what might be important for each individual patient;
• that clinical bioinformaticians can be thought of like librarians, categorising and indexing large amounts of information and making it accessible to those who need it;
• the need to combine knowledge of both computer science and biology to answer questions and solve problems.

This video shows how crucial clinical bioinformaticians are in interpreting the large amounts of data generated by whole genome sequencing.