HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF SCIENCE
Department of Computer Science Colloquium
2016 Series
Towards In Silico Network-driven Combination Drug Therapy: A Big "Small" Data Problem
Dr. Sourav S. Bhowmick
Associate Professor, School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE)
Nanyang Technological University
Date: May 23, 2016 (Monday)
Time: 1:30 - 2:30 pm
Venue: FSC703, Fong Shu Chuen Library, Ho Sin Hang Campus
AbstractInterest 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.
BiographyDr. 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.
********* ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME ***********
(For enquiry, please contact Computer Science Department at 3411 2385)
http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/v1/?page=seminars&id=383