Prof. Dr. Alfonso Valencia, Spanish Research Centre, Madrid

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Who: Prof. Dr. Alfonso Valencia, Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO)

Title: Bioinformatics challenges in Personalize cancer treatment

When: Tuesday, November 16, 2010, 16h00 s.t.

Where: Room B02 (Amphi)

Short summary

Fast progress in genomics is making increasingly possible to use genomic information in the cancer treatment clinical practice, to design clinical trial stratification strategies and ultimately to adjust cancer treatments to genomic composition. It is quite obvious that the complexity of the information makes of Bioinformatics an essential actor in all the basic steps of this new cancer personalize treatment scenarios, including:

structural and functional analysis of the patient genome: Analysis of NGS data. Finding mutations, assigning confidence values and validating them. Analysis of mutations in coding and non-coding regions and assigning them disease-risk. Treatment of structural variations and copy number variations. Functional analysis (gene expression, proteomics, miRNA and other non-coding RNAs, epigenetics marks and others).
Systems level analysis of the information, including: Network/Pathway based interpretation of patient genomic data in the context of disease knowledge. Network/Pathway based interpretation of patient genomic data in the context of drug knowledge (previous compilation of drugs target and mutation disease relations). Comparative analysis of Networks/Pathways altered among different diseases.
Analysis of the information at the clinical level, including: Analysis of genome specific toxicity/drug responses and medical history of the patient, Analysis of the results in animal models (i.e. mouse xenografts). Handling of clinical data through disease ontologies, information extraction from text and related approaches. Treatment of the information at the quantitative level, including drug administration and physiological environments

Furthermore, the specific information on cancer patients would have to be considered in relation with other clinical information, including linking the patient clinical record with individual genomic data, and the information will have to be offered to the physician in the appropriate setting for decision making, along with the rest of the medical information and complementary tests, with tools for prognosis and suggestions of potential and dosages. Last but not least, the information will have to be provided to the patients in the adequate consultation environment with the involvement of the specialist and professionals in the various areas, including of course the bioinformaticians.

During this talk I will revise the current status and main scientific challenges that personalize cancer treatment opens to bioinformatics.

Short Bio

Alfonso Valencia is a biologist with formal training in population genetics and biophysics which he received from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He was awarded his PhD in 1988 at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

He was a Visiting Scientist at the American Red Cross Laboratory in 1987 and from 1989 – 1994 was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the laboratory of C. Sander at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany.

In 1994 he set up the Protein Design Group at the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Madrid where he was appointed as Research Professor in 2005.

He is a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO), Founder and former Vice President of the International Society for Computational Biology where he has been Chair of the Systems Biology and/or Text Mining Tracks of the main Computational Biology Annual Conference (ISMB) since 2003.

Alfonso Valencia serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics, Biozentrum, Basel; the INTERPRO database; the Spanish Grant Evaluation Agency (ANEP); the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) expert panel; as well as the Steering Committee of the European Science Foundation Programme on Functional Genomics (2006 – 2011). His Group participates in the three main Bioinformatics Networks of Excellence organised under the 6th European Framework Programme (BioSapiens, EMBRACE and ENFIN).

Alfonso Valencia is Co-Executive Editor of Bionformatics, serves on the Editorial Board of FEBS J, EMBO Journal and EMBO Reports, among others. He is Director of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB).

"Prof. Dr. Alfonso Valencia, Spanish Research Centre, Madrid" is mentioned on: AI Lecture Series, Vol. III - Final Program