About
Martin Hofmann-Apitius holds a PhD in Molecular Biology and worked for more than 10 years in experimental molecular biology. The screening for novel genes involved in tumour metastasis lead him into the area of functional genomics and subsequently to applied bioinformatics. Martin Hofmann-Apitius has experience in both, academic (University of Heidelberg (ZMBH), Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (ITG), German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)) and industrial (BASF, Boehringer Ingelheim, LION bioscience AG) research. Since 2002 he is leading the Department of Bioinformatics at the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI) in Sankt Augustin (Germany), a governmental non-profit research institute. In July 2006 he has been appointed as a Professor for Applied Life Science Informatics at Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (B-IT).
Martin Hofmann-Apitius is (co-) author of more than 200 scientific publications. Major scientific contributions were the cloning and identification of CD44v, the first gene that mediates metastatic potential to tumour cells, the functional annotation of the mouse transriptome, and information extraction methodology used for the semi-automated generation of the first computable, knowledge-based model for Alzheimer´s Disease.
Martin Hofmann-Apitius was the academic initiator and co-coordinator of IMI-project AETIONOMY, a project aimed at generating a mechanism-based taxonomy of neurodegenerative diseases (see www.aetionomy.org). He was also involved in related IMI-projects, such as EPAD (www.ep-ad.org), PHAGO (www.phago.eu) and RADAR-AD (https://www.radar-ad.org). Furthermore, his team is substantially involved in VirtualBrainCloud (https://virtualbraincloud-2020.eu/tvb-cloud-main.html), a project bridging between “computational neuroscience” and “disease progression modeling” in the area of neurodegenerative diseases and the eBrain-Health project (https://ebrain-health.eu/home.html).
Current research activities at the Department of Bioinformatics at Fraunhofer SCAI focus on:
- Automated methods for the extraction of relevant information from unstructured information sources such as journal publications, patents and clinical documents / EHRs
- Integrative semantics, data- and knowledge-integration in neurodegeneration research
- Knowledge-based, mechanistic modelling of neurodegenerative diseases
- Mining in real-world data (social networks, patient forums, electronic patient records)
- Comparative progression models for neurodegerative diseases
- Longitudinal disease (risk) models in neurology and neuro-psychiatry
Most recently, the team of Martin Hofmann-Apitius has started to investigate the link between SARS-CoV-2 and neurodegeneration applying computational biology and AI approaches. The Department of Bioinformatics at Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing is a key partner for the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the area of data ecosystems for global pandemic intelligence (collaboration with the WHO pandemic intelligence hub in Berlin) and is now studying in data- and knowledge-driven approaches the possible consequences of the COVID pandemic for global mental health.