EuroBioForum 3rd annual conference was held in Tallinn, Estonia, 22 + 23 September 2014

1. Rudi Balling
Director Luxembourg Centre for Systems
Biomedicine, Luxembourg
Perspective from Science

2. The Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
(LCSB)

3. Experimental Biology
Technology platforms
Clinical translational
research
Computer science &
Bioinformatics
Interdisciplinarity of LCSB

4. Neurodegenerative Diseases
as network perturbations

5. 9/26/2014
Mathematicians
Computational
scientists
Engineers
Biologists
Veterinarians
Clinical
Scientists
Interdisciplinarity

6. Lessons learned

7. Interdisciplinarity requires Teamwork
Altshuler & Altshuler, Nature 429, 479-481, 2004
„To put the success of the group
over the success of the individual“

8. Proximity is important

9. Increasing communication
by reciprocal delegation

10. Sharing credit in multidisciplinary teams

11. 9/26/2014
Promoting community-driven approaches
Ines Thiele

12. Vol. 49, 88-102, 2014
http://pdmap.uni.lu/pd_map/
Community-driven Disease Maps

13. How to make comprehensive maps comprehensible

14. 9/26/2014
Construction of a Parkinson´s disease map

15. • Standardized knowledge repository
• Standardized, quality controlled annotations
• Structured Information
• Visualization of large data sets
• Analysis in the context of disease mechanisms
• Interface to bioinformatic and modeling tools
Disease maps as a community crowdsourcing tool

16. Transferring concepts from ecology to medicine

17. Can we identify early warning signals of diseases?

18. 9/26/2014
Different ways in which an ecosystem can respond
to change in conditions
M. Scheffer & R.S. Carpenter Trends in Ecology and Evolution 2003

19. Predicting tipping points: Early warning signals
(Scheffer et al. 2009)
• Coefficient of variation
• Coefficient of auto-correlation
• Skewness

20. 9/26/2014 (Chen et al., Scientific Relports 2012)

21. The next generation of students should learn
how to look for
amplifiers and logic circuits,
as well as to describe and look for
molecules and genes.
(Hartwell et al. Nature 402, C47, 1999)
Training the next generation

22. Personalized medicine is a paradigm shift