BioSB Young Investigator Award 2021

Joske Ubels 

The selection committee of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2021 unanimously chose for Joske Ubels as the winner of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2021! 

Joske will receive the award during the award ceremony on June 15 2021, 16:00 and she will give an honorary lecture.

Biography

Joske Ubels started her bachelor Biomedical Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam in 2009. In 2011 she attended Lunds Universitet in Lund, Sweden for her minor in Neurobiology. After completing an internship in the Oncogenomics lab of the Cancer Center Amsterdam she became interested in oncology research and started the research master Oncology at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. She first became acquainted with bioinformatics research during an internship at SkylineDx in 2013 and became so passionate about it she decided to pursue a PhD in the topic. She started her PhD in September 2015 under the supervision of prof. dr. Pieter Sonneveld at Erasmus MC and dr. Jeroen de Ridder, first at the TU Delft, and later at UMC Utrecht. She defended her PhD thesis “The best treatment for every patient” on 1 December 2020 at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. During her PhD she served as the president of RSG Netherlands and as the PhD student member of the BioSB educational committee. She currently works as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of dr. Ruben van Boxtel at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology. (ORCID)

The right drug for every patient: predicting treatment benefit using transcriptomic and genomic data

Many cancer treatments are associated with serious side effects, while it is known not all patients who receive them see benefit from the treatment. It has become clear both patient and tumor characteristics can influence the response of a cancer patient to a specific treatment and that machine learning approaches can aid in differentiating between poor and good responders. However, often there is more than one drug available and a choice has to be made between them, which is a more challenging problem. Traditional (supervised) machine learning methods cannot be employed when predicting whether a patient will benefit more from a certain treatment than from an alternative. We can only observe the response to a treatment the patient actually receives; we cannot know if they would have responded more or less favourably to an alternative treatment and thus cannot label patients as benefiting or not. Here we present Simulated Treatment Learning (STL), a novel method that can build predictive models without using predefined labels. STL relies on the idea that genetically similar patients who received different treatments can be used to model the response to an alternative treatment. We show STL can successfully be applied to different types of cancer and treatments. The resulting model can identify patients that benefit more from a specific treatment than another in an independent dataset.  

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Call for nominations

During the BioSB 2021 on June 15, we will present the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2021. The winner will receive a voucher of 500 Euros sponsored by the BioSB research school (to be spent on conference or course participation of their choice) and will be invited to present an honorary lecture in the plenary programme.

Criteria

The candidate must have conducted his/her bioinformatics or systems biology research primarily in a Dutch institute. The primary result on which the award will be based will be the PhD thesis written by the candidate. Therefore, the final version of the thesis of the candidate should have been submitted to the PhD committee at the candidate's university on March 21, 2021 at the latest.

Other criteria that might be considered by the award committee are:

• The candidate significantly contributed to the idea of the research;
• The research of the candidate resulted in novel or improved bioinformatics or systems biology methodologies;
• The research of the candidate advanced life sciences research;
• The candidate independently conducted the research;
• The research resulted in a scientific publication, software application or database;
• The work of the candidate has given broad visibility of bioinformatics or systems biology in the life sciences field;
• The candidate has otherwise significantly contributed to bioinformatics/systems biology or the bioinformatics/systems biology community in the Netherlands.

Procedure

Each nomination must be accompanied with:

• Name and affiliation of candidate
• Motivation for nomination by group leader of candidate
• Curriculum Vitae of the candidate
• A URL to the final version of the PhD thesis (preferably to the PDF of the printed version)

Submission deadline: CLOSED

Award committee

The 2021 members of the award committee are:

• Vera van Noort, KU Leuven/Leiden University (ORCID)
• Hanka Venselaar, Radboudumc (ORCID)
• Sergio Martinez Cuesta, Astrazeneca/CRUK Cambridge (ORCID)
• Michiel Adriaens, MaCSBio, University of Maastricht (ORCID)
   

Last year's award winner

Winner of last year's award is Jasmijn Baaijens, Harvard Medical School. (ORCID)