Biomarker Discovery: from theory to real world examples
Date: 13 - 16 October 2025
Language of instruction: English
Application Deadline: 12 September 2025 @ 23:59
National course open for PhD students, postdocs, researchers and other employees in all Swedish universities, in need of understanding biomarker research and methods. We also welcome applications from outside of Sweden and from the non-academic sector, for more info contact us!
Important dates and information
Application opens: 2025-06-16
Application closes: 2025-09-12
Confirmation to accepted students: 2025-09-19
Course Leader and teachers: Animesh Acharjee, Markus Mayrhofer, Mun-Gwan Hong (CL), Paul Pyl, Prasoon Agarwal (CL)
In case you miss information on any of the above dates, please contact: Prasoon Agarwal and Mun-Gwan Hong
Email: edu.biomarkers@nbis.se
Course fee
A course fee* of 2500 SEK for academic participants and 12 000 SEK for non-academic participants will be invoiced to accepted participants. The fee includes lunches, coffee and 1 course dinner.
Please note that NBIS cannot invoice individuals
Course content
The main purpose of this course is to provide a good overview of biomarkers and biomarker studies. This course will explore recent research, showcasing diverse biomarker applications within clinical trials. Methods employed to identify biomarkers through various omics datasets will be reviewed. Participants will engage in discussion on biomarker studies and data analysis exercises that encompass approaches like machine learning methods and other integrative omics strategies used in biomarker discovery.
Topics covered will include:
- Biomarker study design for “context of use”
- Types of biomarkers, diagnostic, prognostic, and wellness
- Biomarkers in use for various diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases
- Biomarker discovery from various omics data including proteome, microbiome
- Biomarker and multi-omics data integration
- Machine learning methods, lasso logistic regression and random forest, to identify biomarkers
- Performance indicators, e.g. sensitivity and specificity
- Internal/external validation
- GitHub Co-pilot in programming in R
Due to limited space the course can accommodate a maximum of 20 participants. If we receive more applications, participants will be selected based on selection criteria, including (but not limited to) correct entry requirements, motivation to attend the course, as well as gender and geographical balance.
Link to application
Contact: edu.biomarkers@nbis.se
Keywords: Bioinformatics
Venue: Air&Fire, SciLifeLab Stockholm
City: Solna
Country: Sweden
Prerequisites:
The following is a list of skills required for being able to follow the course and complete the exercises:
- Ability to bring your own laptop with R installed for the practical exercises
- Basic Programming/scripting experience in R
- or took an R course NBIS prepared.
Desirable, but not essential, skills increasing the output of the course, include:
- Some basic knowledge of biostatistics
- Previous experience in biomarker-related studies
- Co-pilot Pro activated GitHub account (Students and teachers can get it free)
Learning objectives:
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
- Understand the issues in the study design for biomarker discovery
- Perform simple data analysis using processed data about proteome/microbiome for biomarker discovery
- Run simple multi-omics data integration analysis
- Apply logistic regression and random forest to tabular data
- Understand performance evaluation of biomarkers
- Use GitHub Co-pilot in programming in R
Target audience: PhD Students, postdocs, researchers
Cost basis: Cost incurred by all
Cost: kr 2500.0 (SEK)
Activity log
