The Translational Science and Systems medicine (TranSYS) in Personalized Medicine European Training Network (ETN), an EU-funded project (2019-2024, coordinated by Prof Kristel Van Steen at the Catholic University of Louvain and University of Liège, Belgium) hosted its final conference to share the project outputs, and to explore innovative strategies and collaborative approaches in the translation of precision medicine. The meeting, “Bridging Research to Patient Management and Care for a Healthier Tomorrow”, gave a platform to early stage researchers (ESRs) from the network to showcase their work, demonstrating the relevance of the ETN work undertaken over the past 5 years1.
NCMM’s Marieke Kuijjer was invited to deliver the first keynote talk of the Day 2 session: “Building bridges and tearing down silos”. In her talk, titled "Unlocking Cellular Complexity: Multiomics Integration for Personalized Regulatory Networks", she gave an introduction to network medicine, highlighting some of her group's recent tools — SCORPION2, a single-cell gene regulatory network modelling algorithm, and CAVACHON3, a multi-omic data integration approach based on deep learning. Interestingly, by presenting a case study on glioblastoma (an aggressive form of brain cancer), Marieke triggered discussions from participants who were working on glioblastoma either from a patients’ perspective, or to design clinical trials. By sharing their insights, the importance of the computational biology research undertaken by the Kuijjer group can have on the disease diagnostic and treatment, was emphasised.
Throughout the meeting, excellent talks by the ESRs from the TranSYS network, covering a wide range of topics in bridging computational approaches with precision medicine, such as by integrating data in head scans with genetic information, with deep learning, to uncover new cancer subtypes and drivers of obesity, were presented. Marieke was able to discuss with the ESRs their pertinent queries regarding their projects, and the use of the tools designed by her group at NCMM. It enabled her to appreciate the reach of her team’s work, and how it influences the work of others. She said: "It was my highlight of the conference as it is always so motivating to discuss science with talented and smart ESRs".
- https://h2020transys.eu/
- Osorio, D. et al. Population-level comparisons of gene regulatory networks modeled on high-throughput single-cell transcriptomics data. Nat Comput Sci 4, 237–250 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-024-00597-5
- Hsieh P.H. et al. CAVACHON: a hierarchical Variational Autoencoder to integrate multi-modal single-cell data – A Preprint https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.18655