Seminars in Quantitative Biology @ CRUK CI - Prof Julio Saez Rodriguez

Combining multi-omics and biological knowledge to extract disease mechanisms

Multi-omics technologies, and in particular those with single-cell and spatial resolution, provide unique opportunities to study deregulation of intra- and inter-cellular processes in cancer and other diseases. In this talk I will present recent methods and applications from our group towards this aim, with a focus is on computational approaches that combine data with biological knowledge within statistical and machine learning methods. This combination allows us to increase both the statistical power of our approaches and the mechanistic interpretability of the results. I will also discuss the value to perform perturbation studies, combined with mathematical modeling, to increase our understanding and therapeutic opportunities. Finally, I will show how, using novel microfluidics-based technologies, this approach can also be applied directly to biopsies, allowing to build mechanistic models for individual cancer patients, and use these models to propose new therapies.

Julio Saez-Rodriguez is Professor of Medical Bioinformatics and Data Analysis at the Faculty of Medicine of Heidelberg University, director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine, group leader of the EMBL-Heidelberg University Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit, a member of the Heidelberg ELLIS Unit, and a co-director of the DREAM challenges. He holds a PhD (2007) in Chemical Engineering. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and M.I.T (2007- 2010), group leader at EMBL-EBI, Cambridge (2010-2015), and professor of Computational Biomedicine at RWTH Aachen (2015-2018). His research focuses on computational methods to understand and treat the deregulation of cellular networks in disease. The current emphasis in his group is on use of single-cell technologies, multi-omics integration, and understanding multi-cellular communication (see www.saezlab.org).