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The teams

The Bioinformatics Center of the Synergie Lyon Cancer Foundation places its expertise and human and technological resources at the service of the structure and interpretation of cancer genomic data.

Laurie Tonon, Bioinformatics specialist

Bioinformatics center

To complete the design of the research “pipelines” used in the bioinformatics platform, Laurie Tonon has gained specific expertise in the development of data visualisation interfaces and database management.

As part of the bioinformatics platform at the Synergie Lyon Cancer Foundation, Laurie Tonon is involved in the creation of a tool to analyse the genome of cancers. “I look for mutations in the sequencing data sent to the platform, I select and evaluate computer software capable of processing very large data sets in very little time and of providing us with accurate results”, explains Laurie Tonon. “Once I have chosen a software, I also write programs so as to integrate them into the main computing tool of the platform so that they can be used on a daily basis”. The young scientist, who also creates computing tools for the in-house team, is particularly specialised in the development of data visualisation interfaces.

 

By enabling the visualisation of graphs and tables, and by facilitating report editing, these interfaces are the link between the platform databases containing the results of analyses and the bioinformatics specialists”, Laurie Tonon points out. “Built using web technologies and efficient programming languages, such as Java and Python, the architecture and the appearance of these interfaces depends on the needs of the members of the platform. The bioinformatics team particularly uses these interfaces to evaluate the quality of the data obtained”.

 

At the core of scientific activities in the Lyon region, we are able to integrate a variety of research programs

 

Laurie Tonon has an engineering diploma in Information Technology for Health (“diplôme d’ingénieur en technologies de l’information pour la santé”) from the Polytech School for Engineering in Grenoble, a medical computing course where students learn, among other subjects, the management of hospital application systems. In 2008, she graduated with a Masters in Bioinformatics from Cranfield University, UK, where she developed computing tools to quantify the amount of proteins in cell samples. She obtained her first professional experience as an engineer at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (“Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique” or INRIA) in Lille, during which time she was given the opportunity to take part in the technological development of the centre. Laurie Tonon joined the bioinformatics platform of the Synergie Lyon Cancer Foundation in 2011. “I was able to integrate the very dynamic Lyon region and to benefit from a vast computing ecosystem”, Laurie Tonon explains. “The central location of the platform enables it’s scientists to get to know all of the research teams and to be included in many scientific projects”.