Research
Madam Curie once said "We must believe that each of us is able to do something well, and that when we discover what the something is, we must work until we succeed." For her, this "something" was to lead science down a new path toward a great discovery. Time and time again I have asked myself: what is the "something" for me? After many years of tough thinking and struggles, I believe I finally found it. Now it is time to work for success.
Research Summary
For my PhD dissertation, I apply different computational approaches to early stage of drug discovery, mainly aiming at understanding the disease biology and identifying novel drug targets. The methods, very much depending on specific biological projects, include text mining, machine learning, statistical modeling ...
My first project is about using data-mining techniques for high-throughput screening of novel drug targets. For more details, please read the following paper.
Lixia Yao, Andrey Rzhetsky
Quantitative systems-level determinants of human genes targeted by successful drugs.
Genome Res. 18: 206-213 (2008)
Link to PubMed
Or you can look at the following poster presentation at ISMB 2008.
ISMB_poster2008.pdf
My second project is corpus-based calculation of semantic smilarity for synonyms and evaluation of ontologies. It is rooted in computational lingustics and statistical modeling but has great significance in biomedicine. My ultimate goal is to use this method to analyze the textual data related to drug indications and side effects.
If you want to know more about how computational methods can be applied to drug discovery, please read my review paper.
Lixia Yao, James A. Evans, and Andrey Rzhetsky
Novel opportunities for computational biology and sociology in drug discovery.
Trends Biotechnol. 27(9):531-540 (2009)