Introduction
The Translational Bioinformatics Conference (TBC) has been one of the most successful multi-disciplinary conferences in the rapidly emerging fields of bioinformatics and clinical genomics for their bidirectional translations. The Fourth Annual TBC 2014 jointly held with the 8th International Conference on Systems Biology meeting for four days at the Huiquan Dynasty Hotel, Qingdao, China, improved our understanding of novel diagnostics and therapeutics in the era of biomedical big data.
While TBC is organized as an international forum for translational bioinformatics, the first three annual meetings of TBC have been held in Korea since 2011. We appreciate the Chinese Academy of Sciences for hosting TBC 2014 and making TBC a truly international one. Japanese Association of Medical Informatics (JAMI) has unanimously approved to host TBC 2015 in Tokyo in early November, 2015. TBC 2016 will either be held in India or United States. It is a great pleasure to see the real growth of TBC.
NIH Director Francis S. Collins said, "Data creation in today's research is exponentially more rapid than anything we anticipated even a decade ago." The ability to connecting the dots in the wealth biomedical big data will bring us the 'big picture' in a mass of genes, drugs, diseases, and diagnostic, therapeutic and prognostic markers. Steve Jobs said, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." Personalized medicine attempts to determine individual solutions based on the genomic and clinical profiles of each individual, providing opportunity to incorporate individual molecular data into patient care. While a plethora of genomic signatures have successfully demonstrated their predictive power, they are merely statistically-significant differences between dichotomized phenotypes that are in fact severely heterogeneous. Despite many translational barriers, connecting the molecular world to the clinical world and vice versa will undoubtedly benefit human health in the near future.