Professor Sampsa Hautaniemi and his systems biology research group strive to help health-care professionals take the individual characteristics of patients better into account. For example, knowing how to divide cancer patients into two groups – those who can benefit from a specific drug and those who will not – would be extremely useful.
New technologies and research methods have introduced a brand new dimension to the huge amount of data that can be collected on a patient.
Mastering big data
Advanced information technology is a must for processing and analysing huge data sets and refining them into information beneficial to the patient. Mathematical modelling is a vital part of modern medicine.
“Systems biology research integrates IT, mathematics, statistics, biology and medicine. In our work we aim to understand and control biomedical processes using mathematical methods,” Hautaniemi describes.
His group belongs to the Faculty of Medicine’s Genome-scale biology research programme.
Says Hautaniemi: “To complement the computational methods widely used in cancer research, we have developed a computational ecosystem, which enables us to efficiently process large, heterogeneous biomedical data sets.”
The Anders Jahre Prizes are awarded annually for medical research of outstanding quality. The prize winners are selected by a group of international experts. Hautaniemi will share the Anders Jahre Prize for Young Scientists, worth approximately 50,000 euros, with Rickard Sandberg from Karolinska Institutet.
The award ceremony will take place on 15 October 2014 at the University of Oslo.