prof. Kathleen Marchal (PhD)

Nowadays large collection of molecular data on individual tumors or even tumor cells are becoming increasingly available. Our group is developing data-analysis methods that allow mining and integrating these data to identify novel drug targets, biomarkers and to improve cancer subtyping. Because of our expertise with such analysis methods our group became since 2015 member of the international ICGC consortium (International Cancer Genome Consortium).
 

K. Marchal is PI at the Dept of Information Technology and at the Dept of Biochemistry and Bioinformatics, UGent. She is extraordinary professor at the University of Pretoria, Dept of Genetics. The group of Marchal (UGent) focuses on developing computational methods for systems biology by combining advanced statistics and data mining with the proper biological assumptions. This, in order to assist systems biologists with the analysis of their data, but mainly also to discover ‘new biology’ from the meta-analysis of publicly available data. The group’s research has always revolved around ‘networks’. The group’s main expertise in motif detection, network inference and network-based data-interpretation will be key to the current project. Since 2013 the group became interested in using genomic variation to study network evolution in clonal systems, amongst others cancer. In this context the group has done pioneering work in developing methods for the integrative analysis of molecular data (transcriptome, methylome, genome) of clonal systems. The group has developed the first bacterial eQTL system (phenetic) and has published several network-based integrative methods to improve cancer subtyping, driver identification and determination of mode of action with applications in personalized medicine.
 

• dr. Giles Miclotte (PhD) - post-doctoral researcher
• dr. Louise de Schaetzen van Brienen (PhD) - post-doctoral researcher
• Camilo Andres - doctoral fellow
• Razgar Seyed Rahmani - doctoral fellow
• Patricio Puchaicela - doctoral fellow
• Marija Pizurica - doctoral fellow
• Marie Van Hecke - doctoral fellow
• Pieter-Paul Strybol - doctoral fellow
   

• Pathway and network analysis of more than 2,500 whole cancer genomes. BioRXiv, 2018
• SomInaClust: detection of cancer genes based on somatic mutation patterns of inactivation and clustering. BMC Bioinformatics, 2015.
• Pathway Relevance Ranking for Tumor Samples through Network-Based Data Integration. PloS One, 2015.
• Simultaneous discovery of cancer subtypes and subtype features by molecular data integration. Bioinformatics, 2016.
   

• Dept. of Information Technology, IMinds, Ghent University, iGent Toren, Technologiepark 15, 9052 Gent
• Data integration & biological networks
• prof Marchal is interested to receive invitations for presentations or talks