BIOTEC - Biotechnology Center TU Dresden

Drug repositioning applies known drugs to new indications. The most prominent example is Viagra, originally tested against heart disease. Less known, but equally striking, is the antiviral herpes treatment BVDU, which has a positive effect in cancer. In the past, we established that BVDU exerts its anti-cancer effect by inhibiting the chaperone heat shock protein 27, which is over expressed in many cancers and involved in apoptosis. HSP27 is an attractive anti-cancer target, as its inhibition suppresses resistance development against chemotherapy.

To identify novel HSP27 inhibitors, we developed screening algorithms, which identify remotely similar binding sites across evolutionary unrelated target proteins. We screen the entire known structural proteome and predicted and experimentally validated novel HSP27 inhibitors. We are currently testing the compounds in vivo.

Generally, the avalanche of publicly available data on compounds, genes, proteins, and diseases and their relationships creates a tremendous need for computational approaches to organize and analyze this data. In my group we are specifically focusing on developing algorithms and analysis pipelines using protein structures and sequencing data. We currently focus on cancer as application, where we have a wealth of experimental data from collaborations with medical groups.

For a complete list of papers click here 

• New HSP27 inhibitors efficiently down-regulate resistance development in cancer cells
  Heinrich, J.-C., Donakonda, S., Haupt, V. J., Lennig, P., Zhang, Y. and Schroeder, M.
  OncoTarget, 7, 68156-68169, 2016

• Systematic drug perturbations on cancer cells reveal diverse exit paths from proliferative state
  Zhou, J. X., Isik, Z., Xiao, C., Rubin, I., Kauffman, S. A., Schroeder, M. and Huang, S.
  OncoTarget, 7, 2016

• Drug target prioritization by perturbed gene expression and network information
  Isik, Z., Baldow, C., Cannistraci, C. V.  and Schroeder, M.
  Scientific Reports, 5, 2015

• PLIP: fully automated protein-ligand interaction profiler
  Salentin, S., Schreiber, S., Haupt, V. J., Adasme, M. F.  and Schroeder, M.
  Nucleic Acids Research, 43, 2015

• An overview of the BIOASQ large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering competition
  Tsatsaronis, G., et al.
  BMC Bioinformatics, 16, 2015

PLIP

The Protein-Ligand Interaction Profiler (PLIP) is a web service and command line tool for fully automated characterization of non-covalent interactions between proteins and ligands in 3D structures.

GoPubMed

GoPubMed is a novel semantic search engine, which helps answering questions using ontologies.

SCOPPI

 SCOPPI is a database of structural protein interactions.

PowerGraphs

 PowerGraphs is a software to find modules in graphs.

DOG4DAG

DOG4DAG is an ontology generation for ontology terms, definitions and parent-child relationships.

metaPocket 2.0

 

Transinsight is a spin-off founded in late 2005, which markets and develops GoPubMed and related software.

• Transinsight wins German Innovation Prize at Cebit (43 winners out of 2000 submissions) , 3/2011
• Nomination of Dr. Loic Royer for PhD thesis award of German Society of Computing (GI Dissertationspreis). 2.2011
• Christof Winter wins Klaus Tschira prize, Dresden, 10.2010
• GoPubMed wins Deutschen Industriepreis 2010 in category research and development, Hannover. 19.4.2010
• Dr. Andreas Doms wins Georg Helms prize of TU Dresden. 10.2009
• Transinsight wins Red Dot Design Award, Wuppertal, Germany, 8.2009
• Nanometis wins 2nd prize Science4Life businessplan competition, Frankfurt, 7.2009
• Nanometis wins 1st prize FutureSax businessplan competition, Leipzig, 7.2009 
• Nanometis wins Science4Life concept competition, Berlin, 3.2009
• Nomination of Dr. Andreas Henschel for PhD thesis award of German Society of Computing (GI Dissertationspreis). 2.2009
• Lohmann-Medal for diploma thesis of Steffen Jensch. 12.12.2008 
•  Transinsight named among top 5 biotec start ups at European Venture Summit, Düsseldorf, 2.12.2008
• Output-Award of computer science faculty of TU Dresden for GoPubMed. Dresden, 18.4.2008
• 1st prize for presentation of Transinsight at futureSax 'Durchstarten mit Riskikokapital'. Dresden, 17.10.2007 
• BioCreative textmining challenge 2007. Best group in gene name identification task. Madrid, 23.4.2007 
•  Award "Leuchtturmprojekt des High-Tech Gründerfonds" by national ministry for economic affairs and technology for Transinsight.com. Berlin, 16.2.2006
• IBM-prize of computing faculty of TU Dresden for diploma thesis of Andreas Doms, 2005

Current Group

Alex Mestiashvili, Ali Al-Fatlawi, Florian Kaiser,  Gloria Marchesi, Joachim Haupt, Mahmood Nazari, Melissa Adasme, Michael Schroeder.

You can find their contact details on the Staff page

Former PhDs and PostDocs

• Jörg Heinrich, 2012-2018
• Gary Jennings, 2018, now Business Development and Financing Consultant at TissueGUARD, linkedin profile
• Norhan Mahfouz, 2012-2017, now at Ares Genetics, Vienna, linkedin profile
• Sebastian Salentin, 2004-2019, now at BASF, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, linkedin profile
• Mandy Glässer, 2004-2018, now TUD, Dresden
• Janine Roy, 2010-2016, now Staburo, Munich, linkedin profile
• Simone Daminelli, 2010-2016, now at Fios Genomics, Edinburgh, linkedin profile
• George Tsatsaronis, 2010-2015, now Elsevier, Amsterdam, linkedin profile
• Daniel Eisinger, 2010-2015, now Zencap, Berlin
• Maria Kissa, 2011-2015, now PopSugar, San Francisco, USA, linkedin profile
• Eleni Christodoulou, 2011-2015, now National Cancer Center, Singapore, linkedin profile
• Zerrin Isik, 2011-2014, now assistant professor at Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi, Izmir, Turkey, linkedin profile
• Thomas Wächter, 2005-2012, now T-Systems, Dresden, linkedin profile
• Joscha Köllner, 2009-2011, now KiwiGrid, Dresden,  linkedin profile
• Conrad Plake , 2008-20011, now ID Information und Dokumentation im Gesundheitsewsen, Berlin, linkedin profile
• Rainer Winnenburg, 2007-2011, now Senior Data Scientist at AbbVie, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, linkedin profile
• Anne Tuukkanen, 2006-2011, now EMBL, Hamburg
• Dimitra Alexopoulou, 2006-2011, now Biotec, TU Dresden, linkedin profile
• Loic Royer, 2005-2011, now Group Leader at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, San Francisco, linkedin profile
• Frank Dressel, 2005-2011, Dresden
• Christof Winter, 2004-2010, now Groupleader, Munich, linkedin profile
• Heiko Dietze, 2005-2010, now Expert for text mining and semantic search at StepStone, Berlin, Germany, linkedin profile
• Annalisa Marsico, 2006-2010, now Group Leader at Institute of Computational Biology (ICB) Helmholtz Zentrum, München, linkedin profile
• Bill Andreopoulos, 2006-2010, now at San Jose State University, California, USA, linkedin profile
• Andreas Doms, 2004-2009, now SAP Research, Dresden, linkedin profile
• Gihan Dawelbait, 2004-2009, now Masdar, Abu Dhabi
• Andreas Henschel, 2004-2009, now Professor, Masdar, Abu Dhabi, linkedin profile
• Dirk Labudde, 2006-2009, now Professor, FH Mittweida, linkedin profile
• Adrian Paschke, 2007-2008, now Professor, FU Berlin, linkedin profile
• Bingding Huang, 2004-2007, now Professor, Shenzhen Technology University, China, linkedin profile
• Jörg Hakenberg, 2006-2007, now Senior Bioinformatics Scientist, now Illumina, Santa Clara, California, USA, linkedin profile
• Wan Kim, 2004-2006, now Professor, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea 
• Nataraj Dongre, 2004/5, now Data Scientist, Dallas/Fort Worth Area, linkedin profile

Oberwiesentahl Group retreat 2011 

 
We organized the national bioinformatics conference GCB2008

 
 2006 - group retreat in saxonia-switzerland 

 
 2007 - summer excursion 
 

 
 2008 - group retreat in Eibenstock 

 
 2011 - Bowling

 
 2013 - Group retreat in Czech Republic

Funding by BMBF, BMWi, EU, DFG is kindly acknowledged.

• Redivia, BMWi, 2017-2019
• Fortissimo, EU, 2014-2016
• SigSax, Saxony, 2015-2016
• OpenScienceLink, EU, 2013-2016
• Hybris, DFG, 2012-2015
• GeneCloud, BMWi, 2011-2014
• PONTE, EU, 2010-2013 
• PPI-Marker, EU, 2010-2012 
• GoOn, BMBF, 2009-2011 
• Go3R, BMBF, 2009-2012
• CLSD Computational life science lab, BMBF, 2008-2011
• Zoomable Cell, DFG, 2008-2011
• Nanobrain, BMBF, 2008
• Sealife, EU, 2006-2009
• GoEverywhere, EFRE, 2005-2007
• FoldUnfold, EFRE, 2005-2007
• CODI, EFRE, 2004-2006
• REWERSE, EU, 2004-2008
• BioGrid, EU, 2002-2004
• GeneStream, EU, 2002-2003

We take part in the international Bachelor and Master Courses hold at the TU Dresden and BIOTEC. 
Information about the Bioinformatic classes can be found here.

24. Sebastian Salentin. In Silico Identification of Novel Cancer Drugs with 3D Interaction Profiling. Summa cum laude. 2017

23. Norhan Mahfouz. Quantifying the antibiotic resistance potential of wastewater E. coli. 2017

22. Sainitin Donakonda. Prediction and validation of novel compounds binding the cancer target HSPB1. 2015

21. Maria Kissa. Cassandra: drug gene association prediction via text mining and ontologies. 2015

20. Eleni Christodoulou. Detection of KRAS Synthetic Lethal Partners through Integration of existing RNAi Screens. 2015

19. Simone Daminelli. Drug repositioning with incomplete bi-cliques and structural bioinformatics. 2014

18. Joachim Haupt. Protein binding site similarity as driver for drug repositioning. 2014

17. Janine Roy. From correlation to causality: Outcome prediction in cancer. Summa cum laude. 2014

16. Daniel Eisinger. Automated Patent Categorisation and Guided Patent Search using IPC as inspired by MeSH and PubMed. 2013

15. Rainer Winnenburg. Mutations and their role in protein interactions and diseases: Computational methods for automated retrieval, analysis, and application. 2011

14. Conrad Plake. Gene annotation by automated literature analysis with an application to drug-target interaction prediction. 2010 

13. Loic Royer. Unravelling the structure and assessing the quality of protein networks with power graphs. Summa cum laude. 2010 

12. Thomas Wächter. Semi-automated ontology generation for biocuration and semantic search. Summa cum laude. 2010 

11. Heiko Dietze. GoWeb: Semantic search and browsing for the life sciences. 2010 

10. Dimitra Alexopoulou. Word-sense disambiguation in biomedical ontologies. 2010 

9. Annalisa Marsico. Discovery and characterization of new structure and function motifs in alpha-helical transmembrane proteins with an application to interpret Single Molecule Force Spectroscopy data. Summa cum laude. 2009 

8. Christof Winter. Protein interactions in disease: Using structural protein interaction and regulatory networks to predict disease-related mechanisms. Summa cum laude. 2009 

7. Gihan Dawelbait. From cancer gene expression to protein interaction: Interaction prediction, network reasoning and applications in pancreatic cancer. 2009 

6. Andreas Doms. GoPubMed:ontology-based literature search for life sciences. Summa cum laude. 2008

5. Andreas Henschel. A structural classification of protein-protein interactions for deteection Protein interactions. Summa cum laude. 2008

4. Frank Dressel. Sequenz, Energie, Struktur - Untersuchungen zur Beziehung zwischen Primär- und  Tertiärstruktur in globulären und Membran-Proteinen. 2008 

3. Bingding Huang. Improving protein docking with binding site prediction. 2008 

2. Penny Noy. Enhancing comprehension of Complex Data Visualizations: Framework and Techniques Based on Signature Exploration. 2004. 

1. Jacek Gomoluch. Market Protocols for Resource Allocation in Computational Clusters and Grids. 2003