Adil Mardinoglu is a SciLifeLab fellow and the newest addition to the Protein Atlas team of principal investigators. He is the leader of the systems biology group, a group that create biological networks to identify drug targets and discover biomarkers for the development of efficient treatment strategies.

But Adil´s background is not in medicine, he is an electronic engineer with a PhD in computational biology.

– I did my PhD in Ireland where I worked with magnetic drug targeting, he says.

After a one year post doc doing research on neuronal networks, Adil Mardinoglu moved to Chalmers in Gothenburg to join Jens Nielsens group in systems biology.

– Even though I had no experience in systems biology, Jens took me in, and I felt very lucky to become part of one of the leading groups in the field.

In the beginning it was tough in this new field of research, but soon the collaboration between Adil and his mentor kicked off and they gained a strong position in the field, with many publications in high-impact journals.

However, fancy publications are not the main goal for Adil.

– I want our research to make a difference for patients. Publications are just a way of reaching this goal.

The systems biology group has a tight collaboration with many clinicians in the fields of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer (e.g. hepatocellular carcinoma), where they focus their research.

– Focus is of highest importance if you want to do good science, Adil says. People have tried getting us in to many other areas, but this is our focus, and with our extensive network of clinicians giving us data and input from the clinic we can do anything we want.

To keep the contact with the hospital really tight the group has one employed clinician. Otherwise the group consists of computational scientists.

– We are specialists at integrating omics data. Today, everyone is generating this kind of information, but our group is unique because we can help them understand these data, Adil concludes.

Last week on the blog, we presented one of the most recent publications from Adil Mardinoglu and his co-workers, read all about how dysregulated signaling hubs of liver lipid metabolism reveal hepatocellular carcinoma pathogenesis.

Read more about the liver proteome in the Human Protein Atlas.