Metaheuristic methods (e.g. evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence and local search) have been used to discover near-optimal solutions to many problems in bioinformatics and biomedicine for many years. Their ability to search large spaces of potential solutions and generalisability to new problems has seen them generate high quality solutions to problems in sequence alignment, protein folding prediction, gene selection & classification, genome-wide association studies and many others. This workshop will solicit the latest developments of new metaheuristic methods and applications in the bioinformatics and biomedical domains.