César Prada Medina is a Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, in the Department of Clinical Analysis, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences. After he obtained his Biology BSc, he worked at the Research Center for Tropical Diseases (CINTROP) in Colombia and began pursuing a Systems Biology career. Having merged this goal with his biomedical experience allowed his encounter with Helder Nakaya and his further adhesion to the Computational Systems Biology Laboratory.

Project summary

The goal was to better characterize the physiopathological heterogeneity of the Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) disease. His investigation aims to reveal the leukocyte gene expression programs that drive the chronic inflammation in JIA patients. By combining statistical meta-analysis and network medicine principles, he hopes to contribute to approach a more personalized clinical practice on JIA patients.

Project outcomes and impact

In a conjunct effort with the Expression Atlas (EA) team, the majority of the Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) gene expression studies were made available through the Expression Atlas database. During this process, an update on the Experimental Factor Ontology (EFO) repository regarding JIA classification was promoted. These constitute permanent contributions to the scientific community. In addition, the secondment served to secure a collaboration between César’s lab, the Computational Systems Biology Laboratory (CSBL), and the EA team around the meta-analysis of gene expression studies. The CSBL plan to launch a web tool to perform, on demand, gene expression meta-analysis of publicly available data, including the EA resources.