Network-Driven Drug Discovery: An Application of In-Memory Distributed Processing
Network biology views cells as networks of interacting molecules and cellular function as an emergent properties of these networks. If healthy cellular function arises from the normal molecular interactions within the cell then disease mechanisms can be considered as emerging from collections of pathological interactions that only occur in the disease state. Network-driven drug discovery is a practical, in-silico approach to the discovery of new medicines based on the construction and analysis of network representations of disease mechanisms. The talk will discuss the computational techniques used by network-driven drug discovery, and lessons learnt during their in-memory implementation.
Speakers
Jonny
Wray
Head of Discovery Informatics
at
e-therapeutics plc
Jonny Wray is a computational biologist with a unique background in complex systems analysis, computational biology, drug discovery informatics, and software engineering. Jonny was a Fellow in Theoretical Neuroscience at The Neurosciences Institute (New York and San Diego) where his research was aimed at understanding how brain function arises from network structure. More recently, Jonny was Director of Bioinformatics at Five Prime Therapeutics (San Francisco) where he was responsible for the informatics portion of Five Prime’s discovery platform. Jonny is currently the Head of Discovery Informatics at e-Therapeutics plc where he has been responsible for the conceptual development of their network driven discovery approach, and the design of the software platform embodying that approach.
