ANDALUSIAN PLATFORM FOR COMPUTATIONAL MEDICINE - Key Persons

Esther Nieto

es..@juntadeandalucia.es

Job Titles:

Genomic Data Analyst

Faidra Paraskevi

Job Titles:

Vandorou Junior Data Analyst

Gallego Ortega

Job Titles:

Software Developer and Bioinformatics Programming

Gema Roldán

ge..@juntadeandalucia.es

Job Titles:

Developer

Joaquín Dopazo

jo..@juntadeandalucia.es

Job Titles:

Head of Area
Head of the Computational Medicine Platform of Andalucia

Joaquín Dopazo got a degree in Chemistry (1985) and obtained his PhD in Biology at the University of Valencia in 1989. After several postdoctoral appointments in different research centers he worked for 5 years in Glaxo Wellcome (now Glaxo SmithKline) during the late nineties. There he was developing methods for bacterial genomic analysis and he participated in several bacterial and fungal genome projects. In 2000 he moved to the Spanish National Cancer Center (CNIO), where he set up the Bioinformatics group. In the CNIO he designed the first Spanish microarray (the Oncochip) in 2000 and he developed the most used resource for microarray data analysis on the web (GEPAS), now discontinued and included in the Babelomics, one of the most used resources for genomic data analysis and interpretation (cited more than 2000 times). In 2005 Dr. Dopazo moved to the CIPF (Valencia) where he set up the Department of Computational Genomics. In 2017 he moved to the Clinical Bioinformatics Area (Fundacion Progreso y Salud), that become the Computational Medicine Platform of Andalucia after merging the Bioinformatics and Big Data areas. Through different initiatives on innovative ways of using different types of medical data (genocmic, medical image, clinical data, etc.) the PMC constitutes a fundamental driver for the Personalized Medicine Plan of the Andalusian Region. In addition he belongs to the Spanish Network for Research in Rare Diseases (CIBERER) and heads the Computational Systems Medicine group of the IBIS. He belongs to different committees and societies, such as the Advisor Committeee of Personalized Medicine of the Andalusian Public Health System, the Spanish Data Lake, the Fundacion Gadea, the MAQC Society the ELIIS Society. He has promoted genomic projects such as the pioner Medical Genome Project in which 1000 patients of inherited diseases were sequenced as early as in 2011 to search for new biomarkers and disease genes. He has been also promoter of the CitrusGen project to sequence more than 500 citric genomes for genetic improvement purposes. He was also involved in international projects such as the MAQC and currently participates in the Beyond 1 Million Genomes EU project. Dr. Dopazo's interests revolve around different angles of data science, including functional genomics, systems biology, Real World Data analysis, as well as the development of algorithms and software applied to precision medicine and systems medicine. Specifically, he is interested in developing statistical and machine learning methods for large-scale integrative analysis of heterogeneous medical data (including high-throughput genomic data, medical image and clinical data) to understand and discover disease mechanisms and drug action mechanisms. As the Platform of Computational medicine is integrated in the Andalusian Public Health System, different initiatives and pilot projects habe been carried out, such as the Genomic Surveillance Circuit which sequences genomes of emeiging viruses (SARS-CoV-2, monkeypox, Nilo Fever, etc.) and its One Health counterpart SIEGA, for environmental pathogens, or the first Trusted Research Environment iRWD to analyze RWD from the Population Health Database, containing detailed clinical informationa on more than 13 million users of the Andalusian Health System Joaquin Dopazo is the head of the Computational Medicine Platform of Andalucia, Fundacion Progreso y Salud, Sevilla, Spain (since June 2017). He is also heading the Functional Genomics Node of the National Institute of Bioinformatics (INB), the Bioinformatics group of the Center for Biomedical Research on Rare Diseases (CIBERER) and IR of the Systems Medicine group at IBIS, Sevilla.