MIP Seminar: Dr. Avtar Roopra, University Wisconsin-Madison, "Targeting neuroinflammation for disease modification in epilepsy: A data science approach"
- Sponsor
- MIP seminar committee
- Speaker
- Avtar Roopra, Ph.D.
- Views
- 29
- Originating Calendar
- Molecular and Integrative Physiology (MIP) Department Seminar Series
The overarching goal of my laboratory is to understand the mechanisms by which master regulators of signal transduction cascades and gene transcription coordinate large-scale gene expression programs during development and human disease. We have made key discoveries defining fundamental molecular and network level changes underlying epilepsy using novel bioinformatic approaches to identify programmatic drivers of gene expression in disease. The tools we have developed are broadly applicable to understanding transcriptional dynamics across physiological and pathological contexts. These advances have enabled productive collaborations with colleagues in cancer biology, including work with the Miyamoto and Weaver laboratories to study tumor cell plasticity, mitotic checkpoint responses to therapy, and the tumor microenvironment. My long-standing interest in mathematics, combined with extensive experience in molecular and systems neuroscience, has positioned my laboratory to develop and apply innovative computational approaches to address complex biological questions that are otherwise intractable. A major focus of the lab is to define the metabolic, signaling, and epigenetic mechanisms that govern epilepsy and epileptogenesis. We aim to identify conserved master regulators of disease-associated transcriptional programs across multiple animal models and human epilepsy. To this end, I developed the algorithm MAGIC, which mines large-scale transcriptomic data to predict transcription factors and cofactors that drive disease-relevant gene expression changes. At the time of its development, existing approaches often performed poorly, with predictions approaching noise. Through extensive benchmarking, I demonstrated that MAGIC performs as well as, and often better than, existing methods (Roopra, 2020), representing a sustained, single-author effort over seven years. MAGIC subsequently enabled the identification of CP690550 (tofacitinib) as a potent disease-modifying therapy in mouse models of temporal lobe epilepsy (Hoffman et al., 2025).