Ciaran Welsh

MESI-STRAT: Systems Medicine of Metabolic-Signaling Networks -A New Concept for Breast Cancer Patient Stratification. Breast cancer is a complex disease with high prevalence in the European Union and world-wide. 75%-80 of the patients have estrogen receptor-positive (ER)-positive tumors and are treated with endocrine therapies. Endocrine therapies, which block ER-driven tumor growth, show high efficacy. Yet, a significant proportion of the patients will eventually relapse with metastatic breast ...

Systems Biology studies the properties and phenotypes that emerge from the interaction of biomolecules where such properties are not obvious from those of the individual molecules. By connecting fields such as genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, mathematics, cell biology, genetics, mathematics, engineering and computer sciences, Systems Biology enables discovery of yet unknown principles underlying the functioning of living cells. At the same time, testable and predictive models of complex ...

Overall, we will measure in-vitro and model in-silico the short-term biochemical network dynamics of extra cellular matrix maintenance (ECM) in populations of young, old and senescent dermal fibroblasts. We have shown in previous work that differences in network dynamics are highly informative and provide a means to identify parts of the network that could be targeted to restore healthy function.

The work will be first carried out in 2D culture of human dermal fibroblasts then extended to a novel ...