13/12/2017

Thesis lecture of Alba Gutiérrez-Sacristán: "A bioinformatics approach to the study of comorbidity. Insight into mental disorders"

Next friday 15th of December at 11h, Alba Gutiérrez-Sacristán from the Integrative Biomedical Informatics group of GRIB will defense her thesis "A bioinformatics approach to the study of comorbidity. Insight into mental disorders" at the Josep Marull room of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. You are all invited to this event.

Abstract: Clinical and epidemiological studies show that comorbidity, the coexistence of disorders in a patient, has a great impact on the evolution of the health status of patients. Therefore, comorbidity analysis is key to identify new preventive and therapeutic strategies, walking through a more personalized medicine. In order to harness the power of the increasing volume of available health information in the era of big data, this thesis presents the development of new tools and resources for the identification of comorbidity patterns, based on the clinical and molecular information. The comoRbidity package and the psygenet2r one presented in this thesis provide an adequately complete and comprehensive analysis of comorbidities and in particular, offer the users the possibility to design their own comorbidity study according to their needs and specifications. Moreover, due to the significant role that plays the molecular information in interpreting the cause of disease comorbidities and the lack of resources to collect that information in the specific area of mental disorders, a new manual curated database, PsyGeNET, focus on gene-disease association has also been developed. In summary, all the tools developed in this thesis, available to the scientific community and already applied to several studies in the biomedical field, are of immense practical value for the comorbidity analysis and can aid to transform clinical information in a form of knowledge that can be analyzed, interpreted by researchers and applied leading overall, to more personalized medicine.