News

• 10/17-19/2011: Oliver attended the 5th Annual Vaccine Renaissance Conference (Vax-Ren-5) at Providence, RI, USA. In his talk, Oliver introduced Vaxign reverse vaccinology program and how it has been used for vaccine design.
• 10/2-4/2011: Oliver and Allen presented two posters in the 5th Vaccine and ISV Annual Global Congress in Seattle. Oliver's poster title is "VIOLIN: an integrative vaccine research database and analysis system". Allen's poster title is: "Bioinformatics analysis of protective antigens in manually curated Protegen database".
• 10/1/2011: Oliver presented a talk "Genome-wide vaccine target prediction using Vaxign reverse vaccinology" in the 1st Computational Vaccinology workshop prior to the 5th Vaccine and ISV Annual Global Congress. Oliver and Allen has also organized a 1.5-hour Vaxign hands-on exercise.
• 6/20/2011: A comprehensive 26-page review article titled "Emerging Vaccine Informatics" in the Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology 2010 special issue on vaccine informatics was published. Oliver is a co-author of this article. This review also introduces VIOLIN and the Vaccine Ontology (VO).
• 5/19/2011: The University of Michigan Board of Regents approved Dr. Yongqun "Oliver" He's promotion to an Associate Professor in the Medical School with tenure (effective September 1, 2011).
• 4/23-25/2011: Oliver attended the BIT 3rd World Vaccine Congress. He gave a talk on Vaxign vaccine design and co-chaired the section "Section 2-2-1: Bioinformatics, Antigen Design, and Vaccine Development".
• 4/4/2011: He laboratory published a finding in the journal Infection and Immunity, with an article titled "Proinflammatory Caspase-2-Mediated Macrophage Cell Death Induced by a Rough Attenuated Brucella suis Strain". In this article, we discovered a unique proinflammatory caspase-2-mediated programmed cell death induced by a rough attenuated Brucella suis vaccine candidate strain VTRS1, but inhibited by virulent smooth Brucella strains. This unique cell death differs from apoptosis (which is not proinflammatory). It is also different from classical pyroptosis (which is caspase-1 mediated). In the discussion of this paper, we propose to name this type of cell death a "caspase-2-mediated pyroptosis".
• 12/8-9/2010: Oliver, Allen, and Asiyah (Yu Lin) attended the IDO Workshop 2010. In the workshop, Asiyah presented Brucellosis Ontology, Allen presented OntoBee, and Oliver updated the development of Vaccine Ontology (VO).
• 12/4-5/2010: Xinna, Charlie, Denise, and Oliver attended the annual international Brucellosis meeting in Chicago, USA.,
• 9/26-28/2010: Oliver He attended InCoB2010 in Tokyo, Japan. He presented a talk on how to use VIOLIN to analyze and predict Brucella vaccines and vaccine targets.
• 7/9-13/2010: Oliver and Sira attended the Bio-Ontologies 2010 meeting, which is an ISMB SIG meeting. Arzucan Ozgur and Junguk Hur also presented research out of the collaborations between them and He Lab. Andrew attended the general ISMB 2010 meeting and presented his work on Bayesian network modeling.
• 3/22-25/2010: Allen Xiang attended the OBI Spring 2010 Workshop at Vancouver, Canada. He presented a use case on vaccine protection investigation using ontology (OBI and VO)-based ANOVA analysis of literature mined data.
• 11/10-12/2009: Dr. Oliver He and Allen Xiang attended the “UTMB Sealy Center for Vaccine Development Symposium” in Galveston, Texas. Dr. He presented a talk in how to use VIOLIN and VO to analyze Brucella vaccines (http://www.utmb.edu/scvd/2009Symposium.pdf).
• 9/ 21/ 2009: An Notice of Award (NoA) was issued by NIH-NIAID to officially award Oliver He (PI) and his team and collaborators an R01 grant with the title: "Ontology-based Information Network to Support Vaccine Research" (Grant Number: 1R01AI081062-01A1). This is a four-year grant with an aim to develop VO and apply it for ontology-based literature mining and analysis of vaccine-induced protective immune networks.
• 7/24-26/2009: Oliver and two lab members (Allen and Sira) attended the 1st International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO) conference in Buffalo, NY. Two posters and one software demo were presented, all related to Vaccine Ontology development and application.
• 5/27/2009: A "Special Issue on Vaccine Informatics" is now open for manuscript submissions in the Journal of BioMedicine and Biotechnology. Oliver He is the Lead Guest Editor for this special issue. The manuscript due day is October 1, 2009.
• 5/17-21/2009: Oliver attended the 109th ASM General Meeting in Philadelphia, PA. He presented a poster titled "Development of a Community-based Vaccine Ontology".
• 2/2-6/2009: Oliver attended the OBI 2009 Vancouver Workshop. Oliver presented a talk to discuss the relationships between VO and OBI. Oliver has also joined the OBI Consortium and represents the vaccine community in the OBI development.
• 12/9/2008: Oliver He presented an oral presentation in the 2nd Vaccine Congress in Boston. His presentation title was "Vaxign: a web-based vaccine target design program for reverse vaccinology".
• 8/12-14/08: Oliver was awarded to give a speaker presentation in August 2008 in the Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI) conference "Novel Vaccines: Bridging Research, Development & Production", which is part of the Immunotherapeutics& Vaccine Summit--ImVacS. His presentation title is "An Ontology-based Information Network to Support Vaccine Research".
• 10/17/07: Oliver presented a talk to ~30 UROP undergraduate students in Mason Hall about his lab research. Oliver also discussed with UROP students on bioethical issues.
• 10/10/07: Oliver is accepted as a member of the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center in the research program of Tumor Immunology & Host Response. Oliver's key research focus is to study programmed cell death (PCD) pathways due to host-pathogen interactions, particularly, macrophage PCD due to the interaction between macrophages and Brucella. The PCD pathway is also critical for cancer research.
• 9/19-21/07: Oliver attended the Workshop on Infectious Disease Ontology at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and joined a community effort of developing an Infectious disease ontology, led by Drs. Lindsay Cowell and Barry Smith. See more detail on the Infectious Disease Ontology NCBO Wiki.
• 7/14/07: Oliver received his acceptance for attending the Workshop on Infectious Disease Ontology being held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on September 19-21, 2007. Oliver has also been awarded a tuition and travel grant covering full tuition and travel expenses.
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• 8/4/06: Alicia finished her summer research internship in the lab.
• 8/1/06: Andrew and Zuoshuang presented their MARIMBA and miniTUBA projects, respectively, in the 5th Great Lakes Bioinformatics Retreat in Grand Rapids, MI.
• 7/18/2006: Thom Todd joined our lab.
• 7/16/2006: A new paper is published in BMC Bioinformatics: BBP: Brucella Genome Annotation with Literature Mining and Curation.
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• 7/1/2005: Oliver He officially joined the University of Michigan.

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