Ferdinando Bonfiglio

I hold a PhD in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and during my postdoc at Karolinska Institutet I applied my skills to the study of gastrointestinal diseases, in particular inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Here, I have carried out the first powered genome-wide association study (GWAS) of IBS using a large European cohort, namely UK Biobank, where I identified a genome-wide significant association at the locus 9q31.2 in women and also performed several GWAS meta-analyses of European and US cohorts for gene-hunting efforts in other gastrointestinal diseases (e.g. gastroesophageal reflux). I am currently involved in international efforts aimed exploring NGS data to uncover the host-microbiome interactions and to resolve cancer molecular subgroups, pathway signatures and microenvironment compositions that may inform the classification and aid the development of rationally targeted treatments.

I have a strong commitment in translating bioinformatics and computational approaches to the study of human diseases for personalized medicine. I am mostly interested in the possibility to utilize genetic information to predict new therapeutic opportunities, and to validate in silico findings through the integration of bioinformatics prediction models with clinical and molecular data.