Recently, I won a fellowship from Bayer foundation to work on RNAseq based classification of complex diseases at Institute of computational biology, helmholtz Zentrum, munich, Germany . The fellowship will be from 1 January 2018 till 30 June 2018.
Identification of gene expression patterns associated with complex diseases has revolutionized Medicine. Combined with machine learning algorithms, gene expression analysis improved our diagnosis capability dramatically. A popular example is the identification of 50 significant genes known as PAM50 for classification of breast cancer which revolutionized breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Identifying the molecular profiles of diseases not only allows accurate and early diagnosis, but also helps understanding the mechanisms and molecular pathways behind diseases. Such pathways represent the main target of many therapeutic agents which lead to a more accurate and personalized treatment. Accuracy is very important in Medicine and diagnosis based only on patients symptoms is very susceptible to error and subjective bias. On the other side, molecular data provides a powerful objective tool that if combined with domain knowledge will lead us to make better clinical decisions. Inflammatory skin diseases such as psoriasis are very well known now to have a strong genetic predisposition. We will identify the molecular signature of inflammatory skin diseases through gene expression data that we already have in a processed form from diseased as well as normal skin. The purpose of this project is to identify molecular markers that drive the diagnosis of inflammatory skin diseases and build a classifier that physicians can use in clinical settings. We will develop algorithms to identify key genes that can robustly differentiate between different diseases. Next, we will use these genes to develop an ensemble of classifiers to predict the diagnosis of new cases. Finally, we will provide our classifier in the form of a web application to be used for diagnosis and validate it with medical doctors.
Please find attached: