Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Developing Integrated Biological Models from Data for Understanding Diseases

Nirav P Bhatt

Department of Biotechnology, IIT Madras

The functioning of a cell requires multiple processes to act in an integrated manner. It is important to understand mechanisms of these cellular processes in normal and disease states for discovering novel biomarkers and novel therapeutics. The mathematical models describing these processes such as metabolic reactions, signaling and regulatory pathways and their interactions for different contexts (cell types, tissues, diseases) can help to understand these mechanisms in normal and disease states. In this talk, we will present a mathematical framework for developing context-specific genome-scale metabolic models (GMM) integrated with signaling pathways, reactive species pathways, and also different tissues. We will demonstrate that the integration of these pathways can help to understand different diseases such as cancers, metabolic disorders. We will develop integrated models (reactive species pathways with GMMs) for colorectal cancer, basal-like triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), and high grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) using transcriptomics data. We will demonstrate that the proposed integrated biological networks provide insight into the deregulation of different pathways such as fatty acid oxidation and synthesis, glycerophospholipid metabolism, arachidonic acid metabolism, etc. in cancers and mimic cancer phenotypes in-silico.

About the speaker:
Nirav Bhatt is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biotechnology, Bhupat and Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences, IIT Madras. Nirav’s research group works on analysis and control of Complex Biosystems using first-principles and multi-scale and sensor data. The group’s research activities include developing novel AI/ML approaches to biological networks from data, Chemistry inspired AI for drug discovery and synthesis, and control of complex networks such as biological and infrastructure networks He is affiliated with the Centre for Integrative Biology and Systems mEdicine (IBSE) and Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI). He teaches courses in areas of modeling of reaction systems, process control, and AI/ML at IIT Madras.