Dr Marketa Zvelebil

Cancer is frequently caused by the deregulation of complex signalling cascades involving multiple cellular components. A key step in understanding this complexity is the development of a comprehensive combinatorial analysis of data from different experimental sources. This requires a central integrated database and associated analysis and data-mining tools.

Integration of Data
We have recently developed a data integration platform called the ROCK database, to facilitate mapping and analysis of networks from breast cancer functional and molecular profiling datasets. This platform will now be extended to cross-correlate diverse biological datasets to facilitate the detailed mapping of key networks involved in tumourigenesis and metastasis. We project information onto these networks, including kinetic data that allows mathematical modelling of dynamic system behaviour. We will also model docking of ligands to protein structures of key network components to understand the activity of drug binding, and to guide development of new and better lead compounds. The computational integration and mathematical modelling approach will aid extend our understanding of cancer.

Next Generation Signalling
We have developed and integrated a range of data analysis solutions into pipelines. Appropriate software is being developed to allow ROCK database integration, as well as user interaction with the datasets. We will also extend any pipelines developed in-house to integrate signalling network analysis and visualisation.

Mutex
We are using data integration to provide a new level of detail in protein interaction networks by describing the binding interfaces of interacting proteins at residue level. Many proteins have many interaction partners associated with them. Each interactor is time and space specific. Many of these interactions are mutually exclusive, while others are able to bind simultaneously. We will use the structural binding information to evaluate which proteins are mutually exclusive and which can bind simultaneously.

Dr Marketa Zvelebil was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia  but, after the occupation of her country in 1968, her family moved to the USA and then to the Netherlands. In 1979, she decided to come to the UK to finish her education. She studied for her BSc at the University of Sussex, before carrying out her PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London.

She has carried out several research positions at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK), the National Institute of Medical Research. In 1993, Dr Zvelebil joined the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (University College London) to set up a Bioinformatics team and became a Group Leader of the expanding Bioinformatics group as well as Reader in Bioinformatics University College London.

In 2007, Dr Zvelebil was appointed Team Leader of Cancer Informatics at the Breakthrough Research Centre and Reader in Cancer Informatics.

Dr Zvelebil has written and published a small collection of poetry- three of these poems were set to music and have been performed a number of times in London. She loves the arts, mountains and her cats.