La Sapienza - Università di Roma

Prof. Kimberly Glass (Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital)

Network Medicine applies techniques from network science to investigate diseasepathogenesis. A range of network medicine approaches have been developed that usenetworks to provide improvement in the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of complexdiseases. Molecular networks, in particular, provide a powerful approach for identifying disease-related biological mechanisms and dissecting disease heterogeneity by establishing aframework for integrating multiple types of Omics information. Our group has developed a suiteof methods that support this through: (1) integration of multi-omic data through gene regulatorynetwork reconstruction; (2) analysis of networks to identify changes in disease state; and (3)modeling of patient-specific networks to link regulatory alterations with disease phenotype. Inthis lecture series, I will provide a broad introduction to the field of Network Medicine as well asa summary of how molecular networks have been applied in biology and medicine. I will alsogive a detailed review of a collection of methods we designed for gene regulatory networkreconstruction and analysis. Finally, I will discuss several specific applications in which we haveused these approaches to discover new features of disease and to understand the complexregulatory processes at work across patients.