Program
Wednesday, 27 May
12:30 - 14:00 Registration
14:00 - 14:10 Welcome note
Translational bioinformatics
14:10 - 14:45 Graziano Pesole PREPARATA LECTURE
Università di Bari Accurate Genotyping and Tissue-Specific Expression Analysis of the Human Mitochondrial Genome integrating whole genome and direct long-read RNA sequencing data
14:45 Martina VariscoScuola Normale Superiore Beyond the mechanism of action: a data-driven interpretable model reveals new determinants of cancer drug sensitivity
15:00 Dora TortaroloUniversity of Turin Gut microbiome signatures at Multiple Sclerosis onset as an independent early prognostic factor for disease course
15:15 Fabiana GalluzzoUniversity Parthenope of Naples Molecular determinants of antibiotic-ribosome recognition: a comparative analysis
15:30 - 15:40 Presentation of YOUNG BITS, RSG-Italy, SIB Young, CINI Young-InfoLife groups
15:40 - 16:00 Coffee break
16:00 - 19:00 BITS members Assembly
19:30 - 21:00 AperiBITS
Thursday, 28 May
Databases, interoperability and research infrastructure
9:00 - 9:45 Paul Thomas KEYNOTE
University of Southern California & Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Title: TBD
9:45 Giada MalatestaICSC National Research Centre for High Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing Bridging Health Research and Innovation: The Strategic Role of ICSC and the IT4LIA AI Factory in Building a Federated, AIReady Ecosystem for Biomedical Data
10:00 Mehdi ZoubiriUniversity of Padua APICURON: Crediting scientific contributions beyond publications
10:15 Matteo AndrioloUniversity of Padua ArchetypalC: A High-Performance C++ Implementation of Archetypal Analysis for Large-Scale Bioinformatics with Interactive Visualization
10:30 - 11:30 Coffee break & Poster session
Cancer bioinformatics
11:30 - 12:00 Francesca Ciccarelli INVITED SPEAKER
Barts Cancer Institute & The Francis Crick Institute Determinants of response to immunotherapy in colon cancer: why space matters
12:00 Paolo BresolinUniversity of Padua General-Purpose Topology-Aware Embedding of Tumor Phylogenetic Trees with Graph Neural Networks
12:15 Emanuela ScafuriNational Research Council, Naples & Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II Assessing Omics Layer Contributions in Unsupervised Multi-Omics Integration for Patient Stratification
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch and Group photo
14:00 Michele MarzilianoSapienza University of Rome A Spatial Multiplex Proteomics Approach to Study Tumor Microenvironment Remodeling in Treated Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer
14:15 Lorenzo Amir Nemati FardScuola Normale Superiore & University of Pisa Communication Breakdown and Evolution of the Cancer Cell
14:30 Roberto PagliariniUniversity of Udine A computational analysis to decipher different transcriptomic signatures regulating gliomas heterogeneity
14:45 Elia Giuseppe CeroniNational Research Council, Pisa MRI-based intratumoral heterogeneity mapping in Glioblastoma via self-supervised 3D Masked Autoencoder
Omics data, methods and applications
15:00 - 15:30 Ivan Costa INVITED SPEAKER
RWTH Aachen University From Cells to Samples: Algorithms for Multi-Scale Analysis of Spatial Disease Atlases
15:30 - 16:30 Coffee break & Poster session
16:30 - 17:00 Silvio Bicciato INVITED SPEAKER
University of Padua Computational analysis of single-cell spatial omics data: challenges and opportunities
17:00 Matteo MarchionniUniversity of Padua Enhanced cell phenotyping in single-cell and spatial omics using the scPleiades pipeline
17:15 Giorgia BucciarelliUniversity of Trento RNAEventProfiler: A Statistical Framework for Detecting Direct RNA Modification Changes in Complex Experimental Designs
17:30 Veronica GuerriniUniversity of Pisa A Burrows-Wheeler Transform Index for Pangenomes
17:45 Sandro Gepiro ContaldoUniversity of Turin A Bioinformatics Workflow for the Detection of Antimicrobial Resistance-Associated Genomic Variants
18:00 Alessandra LucianiUniversity of Rome Tor Vergata Characterization of Brain Microbiome in Neurodegenerative Disease via Metatranscriptomics
18:15 Eva KönigEurac Research A scalable framework for multi-ancestry meta-analyses of complex traits across heterogeneous cohorts: a phosphate and calcium use case
20:00 Social dinner
Friday, 29 May
AI, models and tools
9:00 - 9:45 Christine Orengo KEYNOTE
University College London CATH and TED reveal novel insights into protein evolution and protein design
9:45 Cristian TaccioliUniversity of Padua & University of Cambridge LLMsFold: Integrating Large Language Models and Biophysical Simulations for De Novo Drug Design
10:00 Giovanni BiroloUniversity of Turin SurvCraft: Decomposing and Recombining Deep Survival Models for Fair Comparison
10:15 Luca AlessandriUniversity of Turin REBEL (Reproducible Environment Builder for Explicit Library Resolution)
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee break
Systems biology and multi-omics
11:00 - 11:45 Filippo Utro BITS LECTURE
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center From Classical to Quantum: New Computational Paradigms for Life Sciences
11:45 Livia PerfettoSapienza University of Rome Novel strategies to derive personalised mechanistic models and signalling-based biomarkers
12:00 Gioele LazzariUniversity of Verona A paradigm shift in genome-scale metabolic models reconstruction: introducing GRAP
12:15 Tania Alonso-VásquezUniversity of Florence Stochasticity in multi-layered Quorum Sensing systems
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch
Proteins
14:00 - 14:30 Gábor Erdős INVITED SPEAKER
Eötvös Loránd University Zero-Shot Prediction of Thermodynamic Properties of Proteins
14:30 Fabio PolticelliRoma Tre University Computational studies of the dynamics of the human iron exporter Ferroportin. Insight into the effect of pathogenic mutations in the transport mechanism
14:45 Carlo FerrariUniversity of Padua Comparing Sequence and Graph Frameworks for Antibody Interaction Site Prediction
15:00 - 15:10 Biohackathon results
15:10 - 15:20 Announcements BITS2027 & BITS2028
15:20 - 15:30 Final remarks
15:30 - 15:45 Break
Young symposium
15:45 Virginia QuadrottaRoma Tre University Title: TBD
16:00 Aldo PastoreFondazione Pisana per la Scienza Title: TBD
16:15 Gaia FagginUniversity of Trento The Cell Marker Accordion 2.0: An Entropy-Driven Framework for Interpretable Cell Type Annotation, Clustering, and Spatial Deconvolution
16:30 Giorgia MazzottiUniversity of Padua Role of sampling in the reconstruction of viral evolutionary networks: the case of SARS-CoV-2 Alpha
16:45 - 17:00 Final remarks
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