January 20, 2020
Dr. Miguel Ponce De Leon and Dr. Arnau Montagud, Barcelona Supercomputing Center will give a talk on Biomedicine, supercomputers and simulations: in silico, experiments and its applications in cancer research, at the Aegean meeting room of the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, on Friday 24/1, at 15:00.
Abstract:
The emergence and continuous advancement of high-throughput technologies in molecular biology have produced a revolution in the production of molecular data. As a result, numerous disciplines have emerged under the name of “omics”, such as genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, among others that aim to quantify the different components of a cell. These technologies have allowed generating large catalogues of cell components as well as interactions maps. However, in order to understand the complex processes that take place within a cell, it is necessary to use models that allow, on the one hand, to integrate and put context to very heterogeneous sources of information and, on the other, to perform simulations or in-silico experiments of different cellular processes. Computational simulations of cellular processes (e.g. metabolism, gene expression, signal transduction) are a critical tool to formulate mechanistic explanations that facilitate the interpretation of experimental results. In addition, simulations can also be used to produce new hypotheses that can be validated or refuted by performing further in-vivo experiments. In this way, the development and use of in-silico models of cell processes can be used, for example, for the search or prioritization of new drugs and therapeutic targets, as well as for the rational design of new treatments. In this talk, we will present different computational approaches used to model and simulate metabolism and cell signalling in the context of cancer research. In addition, we will introduce preliminary results of multi-scale simulations and their application to the study of multi-cellular systems such as tumours or spheroids.
Miguel Ponce De Leon:
Dr. Miguel Ponce De Leon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Computational Biology Group at the Life Science Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. He received his PhD in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biomedicine from the Complutense University of Madrid in 2012. His work focuses on systems biology, scientific computation, reconstruction and simulation of biological networks. At BSC his line of research is the development of systems biology approaches to personalized medicine, with a particular focus on cancer.
https://www.bsc.es/ponce-de-leon-miguel
Arnau Montagud:
Dr. Arnau Montagud is a postdoctoral researcher at the Computational Biology Group at the Life Science Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. He graduated from the University of Valencia in 2006, received his MSc in Cell Biology by the University of Valencia in 2007, and his PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Technical University of Valencia in 2012. His research focuses on systems biology, logical models, data deconvolution and integration for the study of cancer.