323103 VU Data science approaches for advancing drug discovery - MPS5 (2021S)

Data science has become an important field in drug discovery and development nowadays. It offers a level of understanding of health, disease and treatment on a scale never before imagined, i.e. it can help researchers to find new drugs or re-use old drugs for new indications.

In this lecture and seminar we will talk about existing data sources in the open domain, database schemes/structures, database managment systems, data querying, statistical learning, machine learning, chemical data representations used in the domain of life sciences. We will further introduce you into the data management/manipulation tool KNIME, and give some basic introduction into SQL and jupyter notebooks (python).

Content of the lectures:

- VO 1: Traditional drug discovery paradigms and rational drug discovery
- VO 2: Introduction to data-driven drug discovery and translational medicine
- VO 3: Statistics for data sciences: distributions, correlations, hypothesis testing
- VO 4: Statistical Learning/Machine Learning Part 1
- VO 5: Statistical Learning/Machine Learning Part 2
- VO 6: Chemical Data: chemical structure representations, chemical descriptors
- VO 7: Data sources, data integration
- VO 8: Database schemes/structures, data querying

Data Science put into praxis:

The practical part will be performed in the form of either a Journal Club presentation or a small data science project conducted by each student; in the end every student will give a final presentation