Welcome everybody to a new episode of Beyond the Patterns.

Today I have the great pleasure to announce Dr. Julio Vera-Gonzalez, who is a long-term

collaborator with our lab and he is working in systems biology and bioinformatics.

He is a physicist working in medical systems biology since 2005.

Since 2013 he is a professor of systems tumor immunology at the University Clinic and also

a professor at FAU along Nuremberg.

His expertise is in mathematical modeling, bioinformatics and network biology.

In these fields he applies multi-criteria decision algorithms to advanced biomedicine.

Today he will be presenting computational modeling of the gene regulatory networks in

cancer methods and applications to detect predictive signatures.

Julio, it's a great pleasure to have you here.

I'm very much looking forward to your presentation and the stage is yours.

Many thanks for this kind introduction Andreas.

I want to start telling a bit about my life and how I ended up here in Erlangen.

Actually I come from Spain, probably you have noticed it from the name.

Yeah, I come from Canary Islands, you know Spain, these islands in the very, very south

of Europe.

And then I also mentioned that many people ask me always about this.

So we have a university in Canary Islands from the 18th century.

So it started initiating the activities more or less the same time that the University

of Erlangen.

And then there I studied physics and I studied physics there because Canary Islands is a

very good place for astrophysics.

We have a very good dark, clear sky and very large telescopes.

So it's a very good place for making astrophysics.

And then after that I studied biochemistry and molecular biology because I was very much

interested in the complexity of life and because I thought it was really funny the possibility

to mix mathematics and physics together with biology.

And then after that I came to Germany because Germany is the land of ideas.

And also because for Spaniards Germany is always a signorant for high technology.

And this is where I was, this is essentially my first encounter with German high technology

in 2005 when I came to Rostock in the very north of Germany.

The reality is that I came to Germany because Germany was and is still a hot spot for what

we call systems biology and systems medicine.

And this is actually what I'm going to explain through the whole talk, what is systems biology

and how this can be applied in cancer.

Yes, so this is the starting point of my talk.

So if you talk with some experimental biologists they will always tell you that everything

in biology is about molecules.

So it's about genes, it's about proteins.

But if you talk with someone who is actually into systems biology or systems medicine,

we have a slightly different opinion about this.

We think that everything in biology is about networks of interacting molecules.

So usually molecules, genes don't work in isolation, they are integrated into networks

and they interact with each other.

And actually what we have found over the last 15 years or so is that these biochemical or

biological networks are actually very large.

Just to give you an idea, this is a network my team here in Alanyan reconstructed to represent

the genes and the proteins that get activated in macrophages, so a special type of immune

cells when we get infection.