Health Bioinformatics and Personalised Medicine

It is anticipated that in the coming years there will be an opportunity for improving health by introducing informatics models that combine the many complex and heterogeneous health-related data types such as high resolution spatial and temporal genomic and proteomic data, clinical data covering disease status and treatment, and imaging- and metabolomics data for observing phenotypes at molecular to organismal scales.

Bioinformatics has evolved beyond sequence analysis — it is now about large data, multiple layers of additional, sensitive, heterogeneous and complex data making knowledge extraction, security and scaling some of the main topics.

The main future research challenges are related to handling and interpretation of these large-scale heterogeneous data, and our research strategy is focused on developing tools to address these challenges and apply them to data sets to generate biological insights. Methods development is strongest when done in close collaboration with applied needs and realities. Data characterizing biological systems and populations are always incomplete, yet heterogeneous complementary data sources can provide key intelligence to yield mechanistic and predictive insights.

Our research aims at developing analysis systems that utilize biological understanding to expand biological knowledge and create the tools for tomorrow's health care. These insights may be used to tailor medical interventions to different patient groups or individual patients based on their predicted response or risk of disease. 

We work together with Center for Surgical Science (CSS) at the University Hospital Zealand in Køge. The overall aim of this project is to integrate phenotypic data from national population-wide registries with multi omics data generated to characterize colorectal cancer samples and ultimately predict postoperative recurrence of the disease.

The group is also part of the Inter-CeBIL Programme. In this project we work with legal experts to ease the translation of health & life science research to viable and needed products, effective therapies, and high-quality patient care.

This work requires close collaboration with clinicians, industry and wet-lab researchers to ensure that our research is applicable in the real world, and we are actively building collaborations for this purpose.