Keynote - How Open Source Tools Power the Efforts of Biological Data Analysis and Drug Discovery
Angela Pisco is the head of computational biology at insitro. She is passionate about extracting meaningful information from biomedical datasets and use that to improve disease understanding and drug development. She has studied Biomedical Engineering as BSc and MSc and have a PhD in Systems Biology. Her PhD work became the foundation of a new direction of thinking on why cancer develops resistance to chemotherapy, which is the major reason for treatment failure. In her postdoctoral work, she investigated the mechanisms of cellular differentiation in the skin. She developed a 3D computational model that recapitulated the observed changes in the mouse skin connective tissue and dermis during development. The combination of the mathematical analysis with experimental data led to a new understanding of how distinct fibroblast subpopulations become activated, proliferate, and deposit matrix proteins during wound healing. Before moving to insitro, she led the Data Science platform at CZ Biohub. There she made significant contributions for the whole organism cell atlas projects including the first whole mouse cell atlas, the first aging cell atlas, and Tabula Sapiens, one of the first Human Cell Atlas drafts (The Tabula Sapiens Consortium, Science 2022). She is also a founder and core member of Open Problems in Single Cell (openproblems.bio), a community effort to improve multimodal data analysis by both generating gold standard datasets and benchmarking metrics and infrastructure.
