MScBMI Seminar Series featuring Bohdan Khomtchouk, Ph.D., UChicago Medicine

Seminar Overview

In a previous seminar, Dr. Khomtchouk introduced us to the emerging field of cardioinformatics, which deals with the design, implementation, and application of large-scale bioinformatics and computational biology methods to cardiovascular disease (CVD) data storage, computing, and analysis.

For our November Seminar Series, we welcome Dr. Khomtchouk back to discuss the continuation of his work in this field. The focus of this talk will be on the critical unmet need for more and improved precision medicine approaches in cardiovascular/renal/metabolic (CVRM) drug discovery and how computational efforts to enable and sustain such innovation are just now emerging. We will learn how Dr. Khomtchouk’s team engineered new computational drug discovery knowledge graph features for HeartBioPortal (https://heartbioportal.com), the world’s largest human cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease genetics precision medicine platform, to enable data-driven systematic target identification and prioritization of drug targets pertinent to CVRM disease drug discovery pipelines.

About Dr. Khomtchouk

Bohdan Khomtchouk, PhD, does research in the emerging field of cardioinformatics, working at the nexus of bioinformatics and precision cardiology, an area he has been actively pioneering and promoting in public forums with the goal to fight heart disease with computation through the creation of large-scale cardiovascular disease data commons technology. To this end, Dr. Khomtchouk is the lead developer and maintainer of HeartBioPortal, the world’s largest human cardiovascular and cerebrovascular genetics data ecosystem, which enables gene and variant-level search across various heart disease and stroke phenotypes for the broader research community. His principal research focus is on creating biomedical infrastructure platforms that provide powerful query and browsing interfaces between data and user.

Dr. Khomtchouk is also a strong advocate of the need to not only bridge the "bench-to-bedside" divide, but also the "informatics-to-medicine" divide and has previously been involved in the NHLBI Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) Whole Genome Sequencing Program (Atherosclerosis Working Group) and served as a research associate in the VA Palo Alto Healthcare System working on CVD genomics in Korean and Vietnam War veterans enrolled in the Million Veteran Program. Dr. Khomtchouk previously served as an American Heart Association (AHA) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biology and Department of Medicine (Division of Cardiovascular Medicine) at Stanford University.