Longevity -> systems biology -> bioinformatics
15:50 - 16:05, 23rd of May (Wednesday) 2018/ STARTUP STAGE
If we buy a 100-year-old car and renovate it, it may look like new. Moreover, we can renew it once a while over and over, forever. We can replace all the parts, fluids etc. Maybe not even one original part will remain, but it will still be the same car.
The human body is many times more complicated, it also works on the molecular level, not only macroscale mechanical. However, it seems there is no physical obstacle for the human body to last forever like a car, we can not only slow down it's ageing but also reverse it. Ageing is not inevitable, it is just a set of diseases. We have learned how to deal with macroscopic diseases quite well. We put fractures back together, we prevent hypertension, we replace and fix organs in the macroscopic scale, but most of the diseases that we do not cope with have a molecular basis, and we are reaching this level now. The human body is not even 100% mapped at this level yet. This complexity means that IT methods are the appropriate methods to study it. We have already known the human genotype in its entirety (ended in 2003 for 3 billion dollars). It encodes the proteins that make up cells, tissues and organs. However, the cells in the human body consist of over 30 trillion and we can not simulate fully even one of them. Nowadays we are correlating genes and human traits and diseases they fall into. We try to cure and prevent based on the achievements of computer science, however, the road is still ahead of us. We will talk about what is already possible, what is in preparation (and what we are involved in) and what are the perspectives. We will also tell you how to use the latest discoveries and how to join the revolution!