CAMDA 2026 Conference

CAMDA runs in collaboration with ISMB, which joins up with ECCB every other year. CAMDA is an established full conference track at ISMB, representing one of its Communities of Special Interests (COSIs). This gives you wide exposure and further opportunities for interaction with colleagues without separate registration fees. You just register with one of multiple options at ISMB, specifying CAMDA as your interest.

CAMDA focuses on one of the grand challenges of our time, the intelligent exploitation of Big Data in the life sciences. In the post-genomic era, an effective scientific interpretation of large datasets is key to new medical and biological insights from novel high throughput assays and the increasing size of biomedical studies.
CAMDA puts a spotlight on the successful analysis and integration of the massive data sets now prevalent in the life sciences.

This year, recognizing the recent events, the scientific committee of CAMDA has set the following data analysis contest challenges:

• The Health Privacy Challenge presents an interactive platform for achieving trust and robustness in the generation of privacy-preserving synthetic gene expression datasets. Join us in the bulk RNA-seq track to generate synthetic datasets and evaluate them for biological utility and adversarial privacy risk. Or join the single-cell RNA-seq track to develop generative methods with a focus on biological realism and privacy-aware data sharing. 
• The Synthetic Clinical Health Records Challenge provides a rich set of highly realistic Electronic Health Records (EHRs) tracing the diagnosis trajectories of diabetic patients, created with dual-adversarial auto-encoders trained on data from 1.2 million real patients in the Population Health Database of the Andalusian Ministry of Health. Predict relevant diabetes endpoints like blindness or cardiopathy from past diagnosis trajectories!
• The Gut Microbiome Interaction Network Challenge offers thousands of metagenomic samples with taxonomic and functional profiles from healthy and diseased individuals. This time, the challenge shifts the focus from composition to microbiome interaction networks, embracing the Theatre of Activity concept to uncover taxon-taxon, taxon-function, and function-function relationships driving health and disease.
• The Anti-Microbial Resistance Prediction Challenge features thousands of clinical isolate sequences. Predict resistance genes and markers to identify resistant bacteria from WHO’s Priority Pathogen List!

Leading scientists present their best methods and analyses in talks, complemented by poster sessions. Papers based on the submitted extended abstracts enter a fast track for publication in the open access, fully indexed conference proceedings at Frontiers in Genetics.

Related method papers can enter the ISMB proceedings track of the Bioinformatics journal.

All delegates vote for the best-contributed analysis. The top three presenters are honoured each year, with the first prize being the prestigious CAMDA Trophy award.

We cordially invite you to attend and contribute to CAMDA, and look forward to seeing you this year – virtually or in person!   (Fellowships available)