The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Over the last several years, modern biology has undergone an information revolution, which is apparent in a shift of thinking and practice. While typical biological studies were, until recently, mostly focused on specific pathways, like the p53 signaling pathway, the emergence of novel high-throughput technologies now enables the quantification of biological features in a genome-wide scale and on multiple levels of molecular regulation. In this talk I will describe some of the methods developed, in my thesis work, for joint analysis of gene expression data, miRNA expression data, DNA copy number data, pathway information, and clinical information. In particular, I will present a new methodology to uncover potential driver genes in cancer. My talk will focus on understanding the activity and function of miRNAs in breast cancer and cancer in general. Several of our predictions have been experimentally validated showing that integrated data analysis, in the context of a well established biological model, enables capturing not only the dominant primary responses but also finer and less-easily tractable processes.