Dr January Weiner
Berlin Institute of Health, Germany
Keynote Speech: Biomarkers in tuberculosis and individual variability of the host
Abstract
Over the last decade, transcriptional, proteomic and metabolomic biomarkers of tuberculosis (TB) have been firmly established. Recently, biomarkers for TB showed not only the ability to discriminate between this and other diseases, but also to indicate that TB onset can be predicted based on molecular symptoms which occur several months before the disease can be diagnosed. This we call incipient subclinical TB. However, recent investigations show that patients suffering from TB show a significant variability of their responses, which may have important consequences for diagnosis, especially of incipient subclinical TB, as not only the individual responses may vary, but also the speed of TB progression may have substantial individual variability.
Biography
January Weiner is a computational biologist with an evolutionary and mathematical background. During his PhD at the university of Heidelberg, he worked on bacterial transcriptomics. Afterwards, he worked on the evolution of proteins. For the past ten years, he has been working on biomarkers in tuberculosis and novel methods for functional analysis of high throughput data sets in the group of Stefan H. E. Kaufmann at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology. Currently he works at the newly established Berlin Institute of Health.
