Bioinformatics and Genomics unit (B&Gu)

Raffaele Adolfo Prof. Calogero

Prof. Raffaele A. Calogero is the IP Group Bioinformatics and Genomics (B & Gu). B&Gu is an interdisciplinary team made up of biologists and bioinformaticians. The main task of the group is the identification of new biomarkers for better stratification of oncological diseases. The search for biomarkers is done mainly using second generation sequencing technologies applied to transcriptome, genome and miRnome.

In particular our group is characterizing the entire transcriptome of circulating exosomes in the plasma of patients with ALL, CLL, MBL, AML, MDS, MPN as well as in patients with lung cancer. We are also actively engaged in the validation and optimization of RNAseq workflows and in the development of new pipelines for the integrated analysis of genome and transcriptome data in the study of resistance to chemotherapeutics. In short, we are collecting data exome-seq, mRNA/miRNA- seq, MeDIP-seq from CLL/AML samples before chemotherapy is that the resistant clones that developed as a result of chemotherapy. Methylation, SNP, Indel, chimeric proteins, truncated proteins, eQTL, mRNA editing, open circuits mRNA/miRNA, are stored in a relational database. The data above are layered networks of protein-protein interaction, functional pathways and drug targets. The data are then modeled for the identification of specific pathways of the resistance to draw new treatment protocols able to attack in a specific way the resistant clones.