Gökhan Ertaylan
Principal Investigator
Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO), Health, Belgium
A Multi-omics Perspective on Personal Health
Abstract:
Preventive healthcare is rising to the challenge of providing early diagnosis and assistance to the risk populations, effectively allowing individuals to live healthy instead of living with chronic diseases. The term “precision health” is coined to define health and disease quantitatively on the individual level, in an effort to maintain health and prevent/delay the onset of disease(s). The crucial aspect in this endeavor is to be able to collect diverse and meaningful longitudinal data for each individual to systematically define, health and disease by assessing both genetic and environmental factors as well as the interactions among them. The central hypothesis of precision health is that if we can map these factors on the individual level on a temporal axis, we can assess the individual risk(s) for diseases. In a pilot project (I AM Frontier), VITO Health provides this Cross-omics data in an attempt to test this central hypothesis. In this talk we will look into the studies around the globe attempting to quantify health and will try to illustrate the challenges and opportunities lying ahead.
Key references:
Correa Rojo, A., Heylen, D., Aerts, J., Thas, O., Hooyberghs, J., Ertaylan, G., & Valkenborg, D. (2021). Towards Building a Quantitative Proteomics Toolbox in Precision Medicine: A Mini-Review. Frontiers in physiology, 12, 723510. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2021.723510
Biography:
Dr. Ertaylan has received his MSc degree in Bioinformatics and Genomics from Utrecht University in 2006. Later, he has joined Prof. Peter Sloot at the University of Amsterdam on “HIV-Host Immune System Interaction”, where he co-created a personalized decision support system for HIV patients offering the appropriate medications matching HIV genome present in each patient. He has also co-created the first HIV-human protein interaction network. Later he has joined Luxembourg Center for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB), University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg as a Marie Curie Grant Fellow studying Anoikis Resistance in Breast Cancer Metastasis. After successful completion of his fellowship, in 2015, he has worked in Maastricht Center for Systems Biology (MACSBIO), Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands before his current post at VITO.
Currently Gökhan Ertaylan is a principal investigator at the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO) in the Sustainable Health Unit, leading the Systems Biology Platform and Project Lead at Data Driven Health and Prevention. He is leading the efforts in I am Frontier cohort, deep phenotyping of healthy individuals longitudinally, to quantify transitions between health and disease.