We invite all San Diego Biotech Professionals to connect, share ideas, and discuss lab automation, data management and innovation strategies. Hear from Sandor Szalma, former Global Head of Genetics and Systems Biology at Takeda, about his informatics journey.

Date:
Thursday, Sept 12

Time:
5:00pm – 7:00pm

Location:
Farmers and the Seahorse
10996 Torreyana Rd, Ste 240
San Diego, CA 92122

Guest Speaker:
Sandor Szalma, Independent Consultant

Sándor Szalma is an independent consultant specializing in computational biology, bioinformatics, genetics, machine learning, and data science. He has 20 years of experience in pharmaceutical research and development from target identification to translational science and clinical development across different therapeutic areas such as immunology, neuroscience, rare diseases, oncology and infectious diseases.

Most recently, he was Global Head of Genetics and Systems Biology at Takeda Development Center Americas, Inc. where he established the human genetics capability and previously the global computational biology function. He led a diverse team responsible for generating actionable insights to advance the pipeline: target identification, de-risking, and validation, MOA studies, biomarker analysis, patient stratification, indication selection, genotype- phenotype relationship and genetic natural history studies utilizing large, deeply phenotyped, multi-dimensional data. His team developed and implemented machine learning algorithms for oligo design and liability prediction and in silico immunogenicity assessment for protein therapeutics. He was Takeda lead for the UK Biobank Whole Exome Sequencing project, the Whole Genome Sequencing of Tohoku Medical Megabank project, and the Open Targets consortium. He also conceptualized and led the first FAIR data transformation project within Takeda covering a wide range of preclinical and translational science data modalities.

Prior to Takeda, he was at Janssen/J&J for 11 years where he built the external innovation function in IT and championed the first open-source translational science warehouse – tranSMART. He was instrumental initiating and leading pre-competitive consortia under the EU Innovative Medicine Initiative framework such as eTRIKS, Web-RADR, and RADAR-CNS, and led a collaboration creating an open-source biological network management system NDEx.

He was also senior director of computational biology and bioinformatics at Accelrys, Inc. (formerly Biosym and MSI), general manager of QuantumBio, Inc., and adjunct professor at Rutgers.

Sándor Szalma has a doctoral degree from A. Szent-Györgyi University in Szeged and authored 60 per-reviewed papers, book chapters and patents. He is married, has two children, and lives in Carlsbad, California.

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