Andreas Bender, has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant worth about 1.5 million. EUR to work on the effects that combinations of chemicals may have in the human body.
The impact that chemicals have on a biological systems, such as man, is difficult to predict in general and commonly lengthy and expensive tests (such as animal studies) are required for safety assessment. To assess the potential of compound combination to inflict harm is even more difficult, given that tens of thousands of chemicals are used in industrial products, and that hence millions of compounds combinations exist all of which are difficult to evaluate experimentally. (This has also been recognized as a major concern by the European Commission with a call for more research in this area.[1]) In order to still allow some prediction which compound combinations may be more toxic than others, the future work of Andreas will develop new computational methods to integrate chemical and biological data, and to harness machine learning models to understand, and assess, the effect of compound combinations on the human body.
A second area where this work is of much practical relevance is that of (desired) combination therapy, by administering multiple drugs in parallel with the aim of either increasing efficacy, or of decreasing side effects.[2] In this case, the work to be performed will be able to rationally suggest compound combinations, based on the huge amount of chemical, biological and clinical data that is becoming available in public life science databases.
For more information on the group and contact details please see Andreas' webpage
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/environment/chemicals/effects.htm
[2] http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v8/n2/abs/nrd2683.html
Andreas Bender is a Lecturer at the Chemistry Department at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of King's College.