MDS Europe - Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet Muenster

Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet Muenster (Credit: ©Dietmar Rabich, rabich.de, Licence: Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0, Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet Muenster (WWU)

An important institute of the WWU is the institute of Medical Informatics, which conducts research in basic medical science, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Informatics for personalised medicine has gained importance immensely in recent years and is the focus of our research projects.

Core competencies are divided into two research groups: the Biomedical Informatics working group and the Health Informatics working group. The first is concerned with methods for integrative analysis of genomic data, DNA sequence analysis and analysis of high-throughput data in a medical context. This is particularly relevant for cancer research. The second group focuses on systematic processing of patient data for medical research from the electronic health record (EHR) with the single-source concept. Quality of life data is being integrated into the EHR. The overall goal is to assist physicians regarding treatment decisions (Clinical Decision Support) and to develop an infrastructure for medical research.

Our team

Prof. Dr. Martin Dugas

Martin is a medical doctor and a computer scientist with a strong interest in medical informatics and bioinformatics related to leukaemia research. He has expertise in integration of clinical and molecular data and experience with clinical implementation of IT systems at a major university hospital. This knowledge is very valuable in analysing high-throughput data, in particular NGS data, from MDS patients. His involvement in MDS-RIGHT concerns coordination of the Bioinformatics programme. In addition, his team will develop and test the electronic version of the new MDS-specific QUALMS-1 questionnaire.

Dr. rer. medic Sarah Sandmann

Sarah is a staff scientist with a background in molecular biotechnology, medical biometry and biostatistics. Her research focuses on the determination of single nucleotide variants and small insertions/deletions in NGS data. Her interest is the improvement of variant calling by statistical approaches.

Christian Wünsch

Christian is a staff scientist with a background in computer sciences and mathematics. His research focuses on providing, organizing and evaluating comprehensive information about small genomic variants from various data sources and functional prediction tools.

Tobias Brix

Tobias is a staff scientist with dual-degree training (computer sciences and mathematics). His research focuses on automated data analysis pipelines based on standardized metadata and new informatics methods in clinical research.

Tobias Tekath

Tobias is a staff scientist with a background in bioinformatics. His primary research interest is in preprocessing, analyzing and evaluating next generation sequencing data and the integration of various data sources including epigenetic data.