Andrzej Kierzek

Andrzej Kierzek graduated in molecular biology at University of Warsaw and received a PhD in biophysics from Polish Academy of Sciences in 1999. Since, 2004 he has been working at University of Surrey, UK and became Professor of Systems Biology in 2011. In April 2016, he moved to Certara QSP as Head of Systems Modelling. He is visiting Professor of Systems Biology at Surrey. Andrzej has 20 years of experience in computational biology. He has been working in computational systems biology for 15 years. He published models and software for analysis of molecular network dynamics and constraint based modelling of genome scale metabolic networks (GSMNs), including the first GSMN model of M. tuberculosis (Genome Biology (2007) 8:R89). Currently, most of his scientific work focusses on immunogenicity and immune-oncology.

Throughout his career, Andrzej Kierzek provided modelling & simulation support for numerous projects in M. tuberculosis, immunology and oncology in academia and industry. In 2003 he worked on sequence and structure analysis of activation-induced cytidine deaminase, which is key for somatic hypermutation, gene conversion, and class-switch recombination of immunoglobulin genes (Nature Immunology (2003) 4(12):1153). His long-standing interest in M. tuberculosis started with the publication of the first Genome Scale Metabolic Network for this pathogen (Genome Biology (2007) 8:R89). In 2011 he became coordinator of international EraSysBio+ TB-HOST-NET consortium studying interaction between human dendritic cells, macrophages and M. tuberculosis. This project led to unique ~omics datasets supported by mechanistic modelling of pathogen metabolism (BMC Genomics. (2015) 16:372) as well as large scale model of macrophage intracellular signalling published recently as a part of the multi-scale simulation tool development project (Systems Biology and Applications 2, (2016): 16032). Experimental work to test predictions of macrophage model has been possible due to Andrzej’s collaboration with BIOVOCSAFE IMI project dedicated to vaccine safety. In the field of oncology, Andrzej contributed to Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) in prostate cancer (Nature Genetics (2014) 46, 1103–1109) and subsequently performed meta-analysis of breast cancer datasets using unique combination of mechanistic modelling and statistical analysis ( NPG: Scientific Reports. (2016) 6:19771). Since joining Certara in April 2016 Andrzej has been working on consultancy projects in Immune-oncology area. He is scientific lead of the Certara QSP Immunogenicity consortium.