Systems Biology and Personalised Medicine

Photo credit: Victorian Platform Technology Network

Using high-throughput biology (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics) to understand global changes in biological systems, and using this knowledge to inform therapeutic decisions.

Division Phd and Honours research project: 2013 intake

Research focus

Changes in biological pathways during tumour formation, maintenance and spread
Profiling the characteristics that predispose patients to respond differently to therapies
Profiling the mitochondrial proteomes of cells with different sensitivities to apoptosis
Building signalling pathway-based ontologies for biological systems, particularly those dysregulated in disease

Post-genomic biology is gaining new insights into how biological systems work by bringing together biological datasets from disparate technologies such as gene expression microarrays, next-generation sequencing and quantitative tandem mass spectrometry. The large datasets generated by these technologies also mean that biology is rapidly becoming an information–based discipline, and today’s biologist needs the skills to use, access and exploit electronic information just as urgently as laboratory-based expertise. Merging these datasets and exploiting our conclusions for better therapeutic outcomes requires us to re-examine reductionist thinking about biology.