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The Golden Helix Conferences 161

to improving healthcare professionals’ genomics education (Kampourakis
et al., 2014a,b). To this end, there are a plethora of genomics conferences
that are organized in various countries worldwide. However, registration and
tuition fees to attend these conferences, which are mostly organized in the
United States and Western Europe, are prohibitively expensive for partici-
pants originating from developing countries and low-resource environments.
As such, there was an urgent need to establish a series of conferences in
genomic medicine and pharmacogenomics, where the high scientific quality
is met with affordable registration fees and capable of attracting participants
from the developing world.

THE CONCEPT

As previously mentioned, the majority of the prestigious genomics confer-
ences are organized in the United States and Western Europe, which often
poses financial and other (e.g., logistics) restrictions to participants from
Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and low-resource environments from South
and Central Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Ideally, if high-profile academ-
ics and researchers were attracted, as plenary and keynote speakers to genomics
conferences organized in these regions (which are often characterized by beau-
tiful surroundings and rich history), this would, in turn, attract corporate and
charitable entities as sponsors of these scientific events, which would recipro-
cally reduce the overall registration fees, hence making these meetings more
affordable to participants for developing countries. Also, organizing such con-
ferences in different venues and with a different, but always related to genomic
medicine, theme each time, would reduce the logistical burden and make it
easier and more cost-effective for participants from developing countries to
travel to. All the above gave rise to the concept of the Golden Helix conferences
that are outlined below.

THE GOLDEN HELIX CONFERENCES

The Golden Helix conferences are named after the house of Francis Crick
(“the Golden Helix”; 19/20 Portugal Place, Cambridge, UK) to emphasize
their focus on human genomics and personalized medicine. The themes of
these conferences revolve around the fields of genomics, pharmacogenom-
ics, and personalized medicine. There are three different types of Golden
Helix conferences:

1. Golden Helix Symposia
2. Golden Helix Pharmacogenomics Days
3. Golden Helix Summer Schools