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Group of Clinical
Genomic Networks -
Research |
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Department of Molecular Systems
Biology - CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology |
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Translational
research represents a novel approach to life sciences with the specific goal
to enhance and accelerate their applications in healthcare. In
particular, it focuses on multi-disciplinary collaboration among life
sciences, exact sciences. and medicine, with the aim
of advancing “molecular-based medicine”. In fact, it aims to enable
physicians to leverage systems- and computational-biology approaches to allow
early detection of complex diseases, increase efficiency in drug development
and therapy testing, improve drug efficacy, and enable personalized medicine.
Such an approach is necessary ·
to narrow the gap existing between clinical
practice and basic research, ·
to accelerate the bidirectional flow of scientific
discoveries into the clinic and of clinical findings into novel research
directions, and ·
to realize the
(crucial !) return on investment made by private and public institutions on life
science basic research (as pursued for example by the NIH Clinical and
Translational Science Awards network). To fully realize this vision, translational research
requires researchers and clinicians to have access to three types of
information (1)
clinical information, including data contained in hospital systems and
medical records, pathology reports and diagnostic labs, clinical trials
systems and study participant questionnaires; (2)
biomolecular information, including genomics,
proteomics, medical imaging and other high-throughput molecular and cellular
research data; (3)
methods and tool to synergistically
process the data described above. Inflammation
is one of the most ubiquitous phenomena occurring in reaction to a variety of
events. Although selected by evolution as a defense mechanism, several problem occurring at this level lead to the development of
diseases, as a consequence of this mechanism gone awry. This includes complex
and chronic maladies such as cancers and autoimmune diseases. Despite
being a very broadly and long-dated studied topic, elucidating the components
of the inflammatory response is a complex task and requires the analysis of a
variety of information that must be studied at the systemic level, in order
to encompass this complexity. The study of inflammation in this light, is indeed very novel, and we want to take adavantage of all the above mentioned information to
elucidate it. In fact, thanks to the latest advances in biotechnology, it is
nowadays possible to approach this problem with a two-fold systemic
perspective: (i) genome-wide screens (systems view
at different molecular levels transcriptional, post-transcriptional,
translational, etc.); (ii) metagenomic analyses
(human microbiome screens). Our group
contributes to this search applied to a systemic, degenerative autoimmune
disease: rheumatoid arthritis. Our goal is to tackle this problem from all 3
points of view mentioned above.
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