INB-Lunch-Seminar

Problems in biomarker search

Anna Telaar

Identifying biomarkers is an important objective for drug development and towards personalized medicine. The aim of this talk is to introduce three problems of biomarker search: (1) complex designs, (2) mixed tissues and (3) mixed cell types. In the first part we consider the special design of the Grand Challenges in the Global Health project "Biomarkers for the protective immunity against TB in the context of HIV/AIDS in Africa" and we present the results of a univariate and multivariate analysis. Next we introduce pooling (the mixture of sample tissues) and use a simulation study to address the question which influence pooling has, if we search for biomarker patterns. In the last part the focus lies on the problem of gene expression measurement in heterogeneous tissue and a solution approach for it, the deconfounding algorithm by Venet et al.