The Computational Biology & Gene Regulation group aims at developing cutting-edge bioinformatics tools with immediate application to real-life biological problems.  The group was established in 2016 at the Centre for Molecular Medicine Norway (NCMM), Nordic EMBL partner for molecular medicine, University of Oslo. After its launch with funding for an initial 5-year period from NCMM, funding the group was renewed by NCMM after external evaluation for a final 4-year period starting in 2021.

Our computational biology research programme focuses on gene expression regulation and the mechanisms by which it can be disrupted in human diseases such as cancers. In a nutshell, the group develops and applies computational approaches to analyze in house and public multi-omics data to study gene expression dysregulation.

Our future research focus lies within the following main lines of research: (i) further develop computational tools and resources to model and map genome-wide transcription factor – DNA interactions; (ii) characterize somatic cis-regulatory alterations that alter gene regulatory networks in cancer cells; (iii) decipher patient-specific cis-regulatory activity to determine cis-regulatory signatures, onco-enhancers, and the impact of non-coding mutations in breast cancers. The ultimate goal is to conduct basic research that will fuse experimental approaches with the parallel development of computational methods to patient samples. This approach has the potential to shed light on the molecular mechanisms underlying transcriptional dysregulation in cancers and deliver new knowledge in cancer research that will benefit cancer patients in the future.

Wordcloud obtained using the abstracts of our published papers.