Chief Scientist Demetris Skourides recently visited the Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics (CING) where he praised the Department of Bioinformatics (C-BIG) for its exceptional expertise and diverse specialisations.
According to a CING press release, Skourides emphasised the importance of developing multi-disciplinary scientific teams, highlighting the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on value creation and data monetisation strategies.
Skourides underscored the necessity for scientists to work cohesively, integrating data across various customer profiles to create comprehensive patient care journeys.
This approach enables a holistic view of patient care, encompassing pre-treatment, treatment, and post-treatment phases.
He noted that advances in computing power, coupled with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities hosted by cloud providers, are accelerating research and development.
These technological advancements, he suggested, could be a game changer for CING’s Department of Bioinformatics.
The Department of Bioinformatics at CING, led by Professor George Spyrou, was established in 2016 with support from the EU H2020 ERA Chair Grant, BIORISE.
With an EU contribution of €2,273,546 for the period 2015-2020, the department has since become a permanent fixture within CING.
Its mission is to serve as a centre of excellence in applied bioinformatics, focusing on early diagnosis, effective prognosis, and drug discovery, all contributing to the vision of precision and personalised medicine.
The department’s research encompasses advanced computational diagnostics and therapeutics.
“We have a strong interest in applying advanced computational methods such as network analysis, AI-ready data transformations and machine and deep learning model applications, multi-source data integration and modelling to biomedical problems to address issues of complexity,” the press release said.
It also underlined the department’s efforts in wanting to find “hidden criticalities, monitor the systemic changes and ultimately approach with computational methods the most challenging questions related to human health, such as understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying disease and proposing candidate biomarkers and new or repurposed drugs for specific diseases or disease stages”. cyprus-mail
