Form Monday 17 December till Wednesday 19 December, at the "Institut d'Estudis Catalans", twenty biostatisticians, mainly from the US and Europe, where this science is well established, will explain to a multidisciplinary audience the virtues of statistics for biomedical applications at the Barcelona Biomed Conference "Bayesian Methods in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics", which is supported by the BBVA. They will also present the current state of the discipline, the fields to which it is contributing, and the main obstacles to overcome in order to improve the interpretation of data.

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David Rossell, head of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core Facility at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), and Donald Berry, from the aforementioned North American centre, and the ICREA researcher Omiros Papaspiliopoulos, from the Department of Economics at the Pompeu Fabra University, are co-organizers of this conference.

The capacity to obtain and store colossal amounts of biomedical data requires professionals to analyse and interpret them correctly. “Our work consists of making the data talk, extracting relevant information from the huge amount of background noise generated by biology”, explains Rossell. “Biostatistics is like a radar for biomedicine: it allows biologists to navigate in an immense ocean of information with only a small amount of light, saving them from inappropriate experiments and helping them to design consistent ones”.

Statistics have entered the life sciences and they are here to stay. This science emerged in the XVIII century by the hand of the mathematicians Thomas Bayes and Pierre Simon Laplace and was used by Gregor Mendel to demonstrate his theory on genetic inheritance. Since the 90s with the appearance of large genomic studies, statistics has become a fundamental tool for the analysis and interpretation of biomedical data.

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