Program
Wednesday, 27 May
12:30 - 14:00 Registration & sign-in
14:00 - 14:10 Welcome
Translational Bioinformatics
chair(s) to be defined
14:10 - 14:45 Graziano Pesole University of Bari PREPARATA LECTURE 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 Varisco |Oral Presentation| Beyond the mechanism of action: a data-driven interpretable model reveals new determinants of cancer drug sensitivity
15:00 Dora Tortarolo |Oral Presentation| Gut microbiome signatures at Multiple Sclerosis onset as an independent early prognostic factor for disease course
15:15 Fabiana Galluzzo |Oral Presentation| 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
chair(s) to be defined
09:00 - 09:45 Paul Thomas University of Southern California & Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics keynote Homology as a tool for predicting gene functions: what are the limitations and can we push past them?
09:45 Giada Malatesta |Oral Presentation| 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 Zoubiri |Oral Presentation| APICURON: Crediting scientific contributions beyond publications
10:15 Matteo Andriolo |Oral Presentation| 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
chair(s) to be defined
11:30 - 12:00 Francesca Ciccarelli Barts Cancer Institute & The Francis Crick Institute invited speaker Determinants of response to immunotherapy in colon cancer: why space matters
12:00 Paolo Bresolin |Oral Presentation| General-Purpose Topology-Aware Embedding of Tumor Phylogenetic Trees with Graph Neural Networks
12:15 Emanuela Scafuri |Oral Presentation| Assessing Omics Layer Contributions in Unsupervised Multi-Omics Integration for Patient Stratification
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch and group photo
14:00 Michele Marziliano |Oral Presentation| A Spatial Multiplex Proteomics Approach to Study Tumor Microenvironment Remodeling in Treated Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer
14:15 Lorenzo Amir Nemati Fard |Oral Presentation| Communication Breakdown and Evolution of the Cancer Cell
14:30 Roberto Pagliarini |Oral Presentation| A computational analysis to decipher different transcriptomic signatures regulating gliomas heterogeneity
14:45 Elia Giuseppe Ceroni |Oral Presentation| MRI-based intratumoral heterogeneity mapping in Glioblastoma via self-supervised 3D Masked Autoencoder
Omics data, methods and applications
chair(s) to be defined
15:00 - 15:30 Ivan G. Costa RWTH Aachen University invited speaker 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 University of Padua invited speaker Computational analysis of single-cell spatial omics data: challenges and opportunities
17:00 Matteo Marchionni |Oral Presentation| Enhanced cell phenotyping in single-cell and spatial omics using the scPleiades pipeline
17:15 Giorgia Bucciarelli |Oral Presentation| RNAEventProfiler: A Statistical Framework for Detecting Direct RNA Modification Changes in Complex Experimental Designs
17:30 Veronica Guerrini |Oral Presentation| A Burrows-Wheeler Transform Index for Pangenomes
17:45 Sandro Gepiro Contaldo |Oral Presentation| A Bioinformatics Workflow for the Detection of Antimicrobial Resistance-Associated Genomic Variants
18:00 Alessandra Luciani |Oral Presentation| Characterization of Brain Microbiome in Neurodegenerative Disease via Metatranscriptomics
18:15 Eva KöNig |Oral Presentation| 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
chair(s) to be defined
09:00 - 09:45 Christine Orengo University College London keynote CATH and TED reveal novel insights into protein evolution and protein design
09:45 Cristian Taccioli |Oral Presentation| LLMsFold: Integrating Large Language Models and Biophysical Simulations for De Novo Drug Design
10:00 Giovanni Birolo |Oral Presentation| SurvCraft: Decomposing and Recombining Deep Survival Models for Fair Comparison
10:15 Luca Alessandri |Oral Presentation| REBEL (Reproducible Environment Builder for Explicit Library Resolution)
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee break
Systems Biology and Multi-Omics
chair(s) to be defined
11:00 - 11:45 Filippo Utro IBM T.J. Watson Research Center BITS Lecture From Classical to Quantum: New Computational Paradigms for Life Sciences
11:45 Livia Perfetto |Oral Presentation| Novel strategies to derive personalised mechanistic models and signalling-based biomarkers
12:00 Gioele Lazzari |Oral Presentation| A paradigm shift in genome-scale metabolic models reconstruction: introducing GRAP
12:15 Tania Alonso-VáSquez |Oral Presentation| Stochasticity in multi-layered Quorum Sensing systems
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch
Proteins
chair(s) to be defined
14:00 - 14:30 Gábor Erdős Eötvös Loránd University invited speaker Zero-Shot Prediction of Thermodynamic Properties of Proteins
14:30 Sergio Vulterini |Oral Presentation| 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 Ferrari |Oral Presentation| 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 BITS, RSG-Italy & CINI Young InfoLife Symposium
chair(s) to be defined
15:45 Virginia Quadrotta |Oral Presentation| Asymmetric conformational dynamics of the mitochondrial choline carrier SLC25A48 revealed by molecular dynamics simulations
16:00 Gaia Faggin |Oral Presentation| The Cell Marker Accordion 2.0: An Entropy-Driven Framework for Interpretable Cell Type Annotation, Clustering, and Spatial Deconvolution
16:15 Omar Almolla |Oral Presentation| Topological Data Analysis reveals the fine structure of smooth muscle cell phenotypic modulation in human atherosclerotic plaques
16:45 - 17:00 Final remarks
For any query regarding the BITS2026 congress, please write to: