Physics and Engineering at EMBL
Section of a logical model of a signaling network in the hepatocellular carcinoma HepG2 cell line. The upper-right inset shows a subset of the data used to validate the model.
Network modeling applied to medical questions
Cells in our body are able to sense the environment and precisely react to external stimulation. The molecular machinery responsible for this information processing, particularly the pathways that transduce information to the cellular nucleus, is altered in human disease and therefore contains potential targets for therapeutics.
Our group develops computational methods and tools to analyse signal transduction networks, and we collaborate closely with experimentalists to tackle jointly specific biological questions about their deregulation, and to predict effective therapeutic targets. We develop mathematical models that integrate high-throughput data with various sources of prior knowledge, with an emphasis on providing both predictive power of new experiments and insight on the functioning. Towards this end, we combine statistical methods with models describing the mechanisms of signal transduction either as logical or physico-chemical systems.