Open Positions
While we do not have any open funded position at the moment, we always welcome Ph.D. and post-doctoral applications with and without funding. We have a very international working environment with highly energetic people. Proficiency in English is required. Please contact Rudi for details regarding research projects.
Master Thesis Projects
Network Analysis for Drug Repositioning
Drug repositioning, i.e. finding novel applications of existing drugs, is an attractive and promising strategy in recent drug development because of its lower risk and shorter development duration when compared to the traditional drug discovery route. In this project, we aim to build a drug similarity network among FDA approved drugs according to their targets. More specifically, we plan to use bioinformatics tools and drug-target network analysis to compute similarities between pairs of drugs based on gene expression profiles. For the purpose of drug repositioning, a large set of genome-wide transcriptional expression data have been compiled from the Connectivity Map (C-Map) database. We will employ our recent network analysis tool, called DeltaNet, to predict direct gene targets of drugs to the dataset. Afterwards, we will use bioinformatics tools to perform semantic similarity analysis among genes based on their known reported functions (i.e. gene ontology). At the end, we will construct a drug-target similarity network and validate the results using recent drug repositioning case studies.
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Rudiyanto Gunawan
Heeju Noh