Celebrating a new PhD in the field of drug discovery: from drug name relationships to network drug repositioning

Dr. Katjuša Koler, has passed her PhD viva!

Dr. Katjuša Koler

Driving drug discovery

Kat developed PDxN, a drug discovery system that we hope to use to discover drugs that promote resilience against the pathologies of Alzheimer’s while maintaining cognition.

Kat’s thesis; A systematic pathway-based network approach for in silico drug repositioning; focused on the worlds of drug discovery, benchmarking and the taxonomy of drug names. During her PhD training, Kat helped us write a successful National Institutes of Health R01.

Mapping drug name relationships

KATdb

The same drugs have different names, depending on where they are stored, named, created and used. Kat created a semantic translation resource: KATdb, a graph-theoretic structure which addresses the need to identify a drug synonym.

Trichostatin A in KATdb. Three connected components represent trichostatin A.

KATdb unifies and connects drug synonym information, connecting drug names and identifiers from 17 drug databases. 45 different types of drug synonyms are linked, including standardised chemical descriptors, names and database identifiers.

An innovator and teacher, Kat has been a valued member of the Computer Sciences department at the University of Sheffield, as well as the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neurosciences. Kat led the development of students and the community. She is a true leader and we celebrate her success. Dr. Koler is currently a data scientist supporting the NIHR Sheffield Biomedical Research Center.

For access and further information contact us!