Where: Bldg 20, Auditorium
Credit: 3
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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Check out the highlights video of this event!
Arwa Raies
Arwa Raies is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in the United Kingdom. She works with the Open Targets consortium, a large-scale, public-private partnership between several research institutions and pharmaceutical companies. Arwa graduated from KAUST with a Ph.D. in Computer Science. She earned her Master's and Bachelor's in Computer Science from KAUST and Prince Sultan University in Riyadh, respectively. At KAUST, Dr. Raies was a member of the Computational Bioscience Research Center. She has led research projects in the domains of machine learning, natural language processing, and computational toxicology. Her research interests broadly concern bioinformatics, cheminformatics, data mining, and health care.
Dimitrios Kleftogiannis
Dr. Dimitrios Kleftogiannis obtained his Diploma in Computer Science and Engineering (DEng), and his MSc in Bioinformatics from the University of Patras. In 2016 he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at KAUST under the supervision of professor Panos Kalnis, and the mentorship of Professor Vladimir Bajic. After his Ph.D. he conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), and at the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS). He is currently affiliated with the Department of Informatics of the University of Bergen (UiB), and the Centre for Cancer Biomarkers (CCBIO) of the same university. In his work, he combines multi-omics biological datasets with machine learning and other computational approaches to tackle emerging problems in cancer research. He is also investigating the use of liquid biopsies to deliver better cancer diagnosis and personalized cancer medicine. During his research career, Dimitrios has been established many international collaborations, and currently, he holds an honorary research appointment at the Centre for Evolution and Cancer within the Institute of Cancer Research in London. He has co-authored several research articles, and his work has been published in journals from different disciplines including biology, medicine, and informatics.
Eduardo Gorron
Eduardo Gorron is a microbiologist from Colombia and a former student of the MSc in Chemical and Biological Engineering program at KAUST, from which he graduated. After which, he worked in an algae biotechnology project in SABIC CRI at KAUST. He then moved to Colombia where he lectured Biotechnology in different universities. He is now studying his Ph.D. on recombinant protein production at The University of Queensland, Australia. He is involved in a project to produce recombinant collagen and strategies to engineer human collagen to enhance wound healing and other healing processes in the body.
Faisal Nawab
Faisal Nawab is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at UC Santa Cruz. He received his Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara where he won the Computer Science Department best dissertation award. His research lies at the intersection of Big Data management and distributed Cloud Computing systems. More precisely, he works on data management systems that accelerate and support data science and global connectivity, especially in the domains of autonomous, mobile applications and the Internet of Things.
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