The ITB is the largest institute of its kind in Italy and was established to pioneer new types of cross-disciplinary biomedical research by bringing biology, engineering, medicine, and the basic sciences together. This is achieved by means of collaborations between industry and basic scientists and clinicians from a broad range of disciplines. One of the most important aims of its research mission is translating fundamental discoveries into new technologies.The Core Research Overview and the major focuses of the institute are: Cancer/Stem Cell research, Neurodegenerative Diseases, Cardiovascular medicine and Immunology combined with the development of high-throughput bioscience research such as Micro-Array and Proteomic-based technologies, novel high-throughput sequencing projects and Bioinformatics.

Dr. Andreas Gisel Andreas has a degree in Biology from the Swiss Federel Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland and got his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology for the same Institute. After a postdoc at US Berkeley and in Novartis SA in 2008 he got a permanent senior researcher position at ITB in Bari. He is a member of the executive board of EMBnet, the editorial board of the EMBnet.journal and member of the technical committee of IGI, the Italian GRID infrastructure. In two European project he covers leading positions as work group chair of the COST Action ‘SeqAhead’, a network for NGS data analysis and work package leader of the FP7 project ‘AllBio’. His main research interests are sequence analysis of NGS data focusing mainly on the analysis and discovery of smallRNA such as miRNA, applied gene ontology and distributed and GPU oriented bioinformatics applications.