Description

Join us for the annual Alumni Lecture Series, a highlight in the University’s event calendar!

We welcome the return to KAUST of five alumni who will present highlights from their work in business, research, academia, industry, and innovation. 

Brought to you by KAUST Alumni and the Enrichment Office.

 Liquid biopsies: Promises and challenges in the new era of precision oncology by Dimitrios Kleftogiannis, Ph.D. ‘16

The principal objective of precision oncology is to improve cancer diagnosis and treatment. So far, tissue biopsies are widely used to characterize tumor genomes and to track metastatic expansion. From a clinical point of view, analysis of tissue biopsy data is used to guide clinical decisions and to deliver “optimized” cancer therapies. However, analysis of tissue biopsies (i.e., frequently called “needle” biopsies) may not be representative of the entire tumor load (e.g., number of metastases and clone heterogeneity), and very often treatment “tailoring” is limited by constraints on tissue collection and sampling frequency. In the last couple of years, thanks to recent advances in biotechnologies, attention is turning into liquid biopsies, which enable an analysis of tumor genomes using bodily fluids such as blood (e.g., circulating tumor DNA found in plasma).  Recent improvements in genomic and molecular methods are expanding possible applications of circulating tumor DNA as an alternative to the conventional needle biopsies. To this end, several studies have demonstrated the potentials of liquid biopsies to deliver early detection of cancer, more comprehensive tumor characterization, and improved monitoring of cancer patients in real-time. This is a new and exciting research field, which has opened a new era in cancer healthcare and precision oncology. This lecture aims to present recent progress and challenges in liquid biopsies with applications in personalized cancer medicine.

Engineering collagen for wound healing by Eduardo Gorron, MS ‘12

The project I am working on now is the development of a system to produce recombinant collagen and strategies to engineer human collagen to enhance wound healing and other healing processes in the body. Collagen is a protein that consists of peptide repeats, which results in a very regular triple helical formation. This allows us to shorten the protein, and our approach is that it could be engineered as a modular protein, being the modules the domains responsible for binding to different components of the extracellular matrix such as fibronectin, heparin, metalloproteases, and cells via integrin binding domains. Such an approach can be employed to produce engineered collagens specific for concrete applications such as bone repair, cartilage repair, or skin remodeling by utilizing the right functional domains. In this way, this model could be beneficial for personalized medicine objectives.

The Next Transformation in Computing: From the cloud to the wide-area edge by Faisal Nawab, MS ‘11 

Data-intensive computing has been the driving force behind the sustained growth and impact of Internet Services, Big Data analytics, and data science applications. The computing paradigms that support data-intensive applications have been radically transformed many times in the few past decades. In this talk, we will take a closer look at these past transformations to have a better understanding of the patterns that drive them. With this understanding, we can project how computing evolves and predict the key technologies that are going to shape the new transformation in computing. Specifically, we observe a pattern in computing where technologies bounce between phases of distribution and centralization. Most recently, computing has been in a phase of centralizing resources in large-scale data centers in what is known as cloud computing. The next transformation is going to be an evolution of cloud computing to be more distributed beyond traditional data centers. In the talk, we will describe the characteristics of this next transformation and how recent advances in edge-cloud and blockchain systems are precursors for the new computing paradigm.

Navigating the complexity of diseases genetics for improved prediction of drugs success by Arwa Raies, Ph.D.‘12

In this talk, I will present my research at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). I will briefly go over the challenges facing drug development and how we can leverage human genetics data for systematic drug target identification and prioritization. I will present an application of Artificial Intelligence to discover new therapeutic targets from large biological networks that consist of millions of links between drugs, targets, diseases, and biological concepts extracted from biomedical literature.  

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