Colloquia, Seminars and Conference News
Title : From Genes to Drugs: Overview of Computational Biology Approaches Aimed at Selecting Targets
Date : October 26, 2007. (11:00 am) Tea starts half an hour before each seminar
Location: ITEB 336
Speaker : Dr. Manuel Duval & Dr. Michael Miller
Abstract:
The end product of our bio-pharmaceutical research organization is a safe and effective therapeutic agent. Such a compound physically interacts with a biological object which is the presumed causative event leading to the therapeutic outcome. This biological object belongs to a class of biological macromolecules referred to as proteins (aka polypeptides). The composition of a protein is specified by a gene. The Human genome (the genome is the set of all genes) contains roughly 25,000 elements.
At the very beginning of a new drug discovery project lays the selection of a gene. Hence, the starting point of a biopharmaceutical research program coincides with the selection of one element out of a set of 25,000. Biomedical research applies a wide range of experimental methods to assign biological function to genes. A wealth of information is therefore available to computational biologists in our attempt to predict the biological outcome of a candidate drug compound acting on any given gene product (by gene product is meant a protein). The two major sources of data used to select target genes are genetic polymorphism and gene expression value. Genetic polymorphism is a measure of the difference in the DNA sequence composition of genes between individuals. Gene expression value refers to the amount of RNA (RNA are copied from genomic DNA and are used as templates for protein synthesis). RNA amount is a quantity which varies with respect to organs and with respect to physiological conditions.
An approach to test whether inter-individual variability in genes can be a factor in drug development will be presented, as well as a typical workflow showing how large gene expression data sets are analyzed to identify potential gene targets.
We expect an informal discussion following the presentation.
Bio: Manuel Duval got his PhD in Biochemistry/Molecular Biology from the University of Grenoble (France) in 1996. He then joined Texas A&M as a post-doc where he was involved in capturing and analyzing high throughput DNA sequence and gene expression data. Sponsored by Dr. Terry Thomas, Director of the Texas A&M Biology Dept, he attended as a non degree-seeking student at the Comp. Sci Dept of Texas A&M. He then joined Pfizer in 2001, first in a Research Campus in France prior to his appointment to the CT Campus in Groton at the end of 2003. Since then, he has been running for 4 years the computational biology research programs within the Computational Science Department directed by Dr. Michael Miller. He is mainly involved in the analysis of large gene expression data sets and in the integration of various heterogeneous data types.
Dr. Michael Miller, Head of the Computational Science Department in Pfizer Global R&D, will join Manuel and will be glad to discuss with the audience at the end of the talk.
[Back]
