Clinical Bioinformatics

Prof. Dr. Manfred Claassen has been appointed as Professor for "Clinical Bioinformatics" at the Medical Faculty of the University of Tübingen since January 2020. He is a Member of our Cluster and is being supported with funds for a research project.

Manfred Claassen’s research focuses on learning explainable quantitative models in systems medicine from high dimensional single-cell omics data. Health and disease status of multicellular organisms pivotally depends on rare cell populations, such as hematopoietic stem cells or tumor initiating cell subsets. The Claassen lab develop representation learning approaches to identify disease associated cell subsets, ultimately enabling comparative single-cell studies, e.g. for immunotherapy response prediction in melanoma or diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and detection spatial tissue determinants of disease association. Particular focus lies on dynamic processes which are increasingly studied by high-dimensional single-cell snapshots. Such measurements enable evaluation of cell population distributions and their evolution over time. We develop machine learning approaches to describe this evolution and in the past contributed sparse regression, probabilistic graphical modeling, supervised surrogate learning, supervised pseudotime and operator approximation approaches for single-cell omics time series analysis.