The 3rd Big Data Forum for Life and Health Sciences was held in Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) during October 11-14, 2018. BIG Data Center (BIGD) played host to this forum. 25 speakers reported and discussed their latest work and progresses. A total of more than 200 participants attended this forum. 

One important topic is precision medical data mining and translation, and speakers reported their progresses on construction of a reference genome from a northern Han individual based on CAS cohort, tackling the bottleneck of comprehensive cancer diagnostics through variant interpretation, using P4 medicine strategy to prevent chronic diseases in China, chemoresistance in patients with acute leukemia, utilizing big epigenomic data for cancer gene discovery, etc. 

In addition, topics on big data deposition and sharing, genome annotation and interpretation, protein function, and biocloud platform were also extensively discussed. Speakers reported their studies on genetic diversity of long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) in Thailand and its application for biomedical research, the update process of Clusters of Orthologous Genes (COG) database and its importance on genome and protein function annotation, human brain evolution in context of enhancer divergence, (4) biocloud platform for bioinformatics studies in the big data era, etc. 

This forum has strengthened the academic exchanges and cooperation between domestic and foreign experts, and will promote the construction of platform for big data deposition, integration and sharing.  

The forum is supported by CAS International Partnership Program, National Key Research and Development Program of China, and IUBS.  

Speakers came from National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), Weill Cornell Medical College, Vavilov Institute of General Genetics of Russian Academy of Sciences, ETH Zurich, Quaid-i-Azam University of Pakistan, Chulalongkorn University of Thailand, Singapore Bioinformatics Institute, Peking University, Fudan University, Zhejiang University, Harbin Medical University, Biomarker Biotechnology Company, as well as many institutes of CAS, and other institutes/universities.