Optimisation and drug-discovery oriented analyses of CRISPR-Cas9 screens.

Keynote of Francesco Ioro, Wellcome Sanger Institute, cambridge, UK; Human Technopole, Milano, Italy
at st Young Scientist Cancer Congress, 05 of october, Toulouse, France
Francesco Iorio is a Research Group leader in the Computational Biology Research Centre of Human Technopole (the life science institute in Milan, Italy). His group works at the interface of biology, machine learning, statistics and information theory to understand and predict how genomic alterations and molecular traits from other omics contribute to pathological processes, biological circuits’ rewiring and impact therapeutic responses in human cancers and other diseases.
Their research aims to advance human health by designing algorithms, computational tools and novel analytical methods for integrating and analyzing pharmacogenomics and functional-genomics datasets to identify new therapeutic targets, biomarkers and drug repositioning opportunities.
The Iorio Group is contributing to creating a comprehensive map of all the genetic dependencies in human cancers and developing a computational infrastructure for translating this map into guidelines for early-stage drug development and precision medicine.
They design, implement and maintain bioinformatics methods and original tools for the assessment of cancer pre-clinical models, the pre-processing, analysis and visualization of genome-editing screening data for the in-silico correction of new-technology-specific biases in such data, and the optimisation of single guide RNA libraries for pooled CRISPR-Cas9 screens and other experimental settings.
They are also interested in big-data analytics, developing biomedical predictive models based on non-biomedical data, and computationally efficient constrained randomisation strategies for testing combinatorial properties in large-scale genomic datasets and networks.