Bin and Zhou awarded NIH grant

Chen Bin, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Human Development, and Jiayu Zhou, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, have been awarded an NIH grant ($2.11M) titled “Repurpose open data to discover therapeutics for understudied diseases”

Abstract:

Many diseases are understudied because they are rare or of little public interest. The effect of each understudied disease may be limited, but the cumulative effects of all these diseases could be profound. One common research challenge for these diseases is that the resources allocated to each is often limited. A centralized informatics system that allows prediction of therapeutics for further experimental validation is thus of great interest to researchers working on understudied diseases. In this study, we propose four specific aims: 1) developing novel deep learning methods to select precise reference normal tissues for disease signature creation, 2) developing computational methods to reuse drug profiles from other disease models for drug prediction, 3) integrating open efficacy data to identify new targets from the systems-based approach, and 4) developing a centralized platform and promoting the platform in the scientific community.

(Date Posted: 2019-08-20)