It is time to kick off our fourth annual abstract challenge! Our mission at Golden Helix is to enable Precision Medicine. We accomplish this by creating powerful software that enables both researchers and clinicians to complete complex analysis. This competition allows us to enable discovery by awarding software to those making an impact in the field. The competition has been very successful over the last few years and we look forward to another great year.

Our competition calls for abstracts and we will award 3 deserving applicants with a variety of prizes including a new laptop, software licenses, and the opportunity to present their work to the community in a live webcast. Our winners this year will receive a year’s license to the software tool of their choice – SNP & Variation Suite (SVS), an integrated collection of powerful analytic tools for managing, analyzing, and visualizing multifaceted genomic and phenotypic data, or VarSeq which streamlines the process of annotating and filtering variants obtained from next-generation sequencing pipelines in order to find variants of interest in a very efficient and straightforward manner.

Last year’s first place winner was Dr. Folefac Aminkeng of the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics (CMMT) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. Dr. Aminkeng presented on the pharmacogenomic prediction of Antracycline-induced cardiotoxicity. Dr. Robert Hamilton of the SickKids Hospital in Toronto was our second place winner. Dr. Hamilton presented his work using whole exome sequencing to identify cardiomyopathy genes in distant families. And our third place winner, Rohan Palmer of Emory University (then of Brown University) presented his work investigating shared additive genetic variation for alcohol dependence.

The contest is officially open today and you can read more about the details and enter, by visiting our website here. We look forward to hearing about your work!