This book constitutes the proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications, ISBRA 2021, held in Shenzhen, China, in November 2021. The 51 full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 135 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: AI and disease; computational proteomics; biomedical imaging; drug screening and drug-drug interaction prediction; Biomedical data; sequencing data analysis.