In episode 44 of the Nextflow Channels podcast, Phil Ewels welcomes Alex Pelzer— a key figure in the Nextflow and nf-core community. Alex shares his journey from academia to the pharmaceutical industry, highlighting the critical role of regulatory frameworks in bioinformatics.

🌟 Key Highlights:

• The transition from working at QBiC to Boehringer Ingelheim.
• The importance of maintaining high-quality, reproducible pipelines in bioinformatics.
• Understanding regulatory requirements and their impact on clinical trials.
• How regulatory standards and open-source initiatives like @nf-core are shaping the future of bioinformatics.

Alex also discusses the formation of the @nf-core Regulatory Special Interest Group, which aims to bring together experts in the field to establish and promote best practices for ensuring pipeline quality and compliance with regulatory standards.

Looking forward to seeing many of you at the upcoming #NextflowSummit in Barcelona this October! We’ll be working with this #regulatory group during the nf-core hackathon.

00:00 Episode 44: Regulatory revolution 00:06 Introductions 00:33 Upcoming Nextflow Summit Announcement 01:34 Alex’s Background and Early Days with Nextflow 04:41 Formation and Growth of nf-core 06:18 Transition to Pharma and Regulatory Work 08:56 Regulatory Challenges and Practices in Bioinformatics 13:30 Tool Selection and Quality Assurance 15:23 Evaluating Software Trustworthiness 17:08 Overhead in Academia vs. Industry 18:11 Downstream analysis 20:57 Regulatory Special Interest Group 25:28 Special Interest Groups in nf-core 28:59 Future Directions and Community Involvement 30:15 Open source contributions in pharma 33:27 Conclusion and Upcoming Events