Colloquia / Seminars / Industry Talks

Interest in combination drug treatment arising from positive clinical experience in diseases, such as cancer, has sparked renewed research efforts in combination drugs. A key benefit of drug combinations is drug synergy where the overall therapeutic effect is greater than the sum of the individual drug effect. However, not all drug combinations produce such synergy. Hence, there is a need for a rational approach in developing synergistic drug combinations. Recently, several in silico approaches based on combinatorial optimization have been proposed for identifying drug combinations. However, these approaches are prohibitively expensive especially for problems with high degrees of freedom. Additionally, they are not synergistic and oblivious to off-target effects which play critical role in determining efficacy and safety of the drug combinations. This talk consists of three parts. First, for the bene_t of the audience who are not familiar with biology, the fundamental biological concepts related to this talk will be introduced. Second, we give an overview of a novel network-driven, fast, in silico framework called Trecento for identifying synergistic target combinations. Third, we show a short video of Trecento in action to identify target combinations for breast cancer. In summary, Trecento takes us a step closer towards realizing our grand goal of in silico combination therapy.

Dr. Sourav S. Bhowmick is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE), Nanyang Technological University. He leads the data management research group (DANTe) in SCSE. He was a Visiting Associate Professor at the Biological Engineering Division, Massachusetts Institute of Technology during 2007-2013. He also held the position of Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) Fellow in Computation and Systems Biology program. His current research interests include data management, data analytics, computational social science and network-based systems biology. He has published more than 60 papers in top-tier venues such as VLDB, IEEE ICDE, ACM WWW, ACM SIGMOD, ACM SIGIR, ACM SIGKDD, ACM MM, Bioinformatics, Biophysical Journal, IEEE TKDE, and VLDB Journal. He is serving as a PC member of various conferences and workshops and reviewer for various database, data mining, and bioinformatics journals. He has served as a program chair/co-chair of several international workshops and conferences such as DASFAA 2014, DEXA 2008 and DEXA 2009. He is a member of the editorial boards of several international journals. Sourav has been keynote and tutorial speaker for several international conferences. He has received Best Paper Awards at ACM CIKM 2004 and ACM BCB 2011 for papers related to evolution mining and biological network summarization, respectively. His work on computational social science was nominated for the best paper award in ACM SIGMOD 2015.