Artificial intelligence that reveals how diseases alter human cells and helps discover new drugs and treatments. This is the ambition of an entirely new research program launched at the Bulgarian INSAIT institute at Sofia University „St. Kliment Ohridski“.
The new program is headed by Dr. Alexandrina Goeva - an internationally renowned Bulgarian scientist with an impressive career in the US and Canada. She is returning to Bulgaria from the University of Toronto, where she established and led her own research group in the fields of machine learning and computational biology. Before that, she worked for seven years at the prestigious Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University.
INSAIT gives her the opportunity to continue her research at a world-class level while also applying her accumulated knowledge and experience to the development of Bulgarian science and the creation of technologies that could change the future of medicine. The institute's new program will bring together advances in artificial intelligence, mathematics and biology in the search for an answer to one of the most important questions facing modern medicine - how to detect disease-related changes earlier and how to steer cells back toward normal functioning.
At the heart of the research is the ability of artificial intelligence to analyze vast amounts of biological data and detect patterns that remain unnoticed by traditional methods. This will enable scientists to predict how cells respond to different drugs and determine which substances or combinations have the greatest potential for treatment. This is particularly important because the possible combinations are practically innumerable, while laboratory experiments can examine only a small fraction of them.
Dr. Alexandrina Goeva's scientific career began in Bulgaria. She is a graduate of the Sofia High School of Mathematics and holds a degree in applied mathematics from Sofia University. She continued her education in the US, where she earned a master's degree in mathematics and a PhD in statistics from Boston University. Her research has been published in some of the world's most authoritative international journals, including Science, Cell, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Communications and Cell Reports. Her work has received more than 7,200 citations, according to Google Scholar - an indication of the international recognition and significance of her research. She is also the creator of HiDDEN - an innovative machine-learning method that has uncovered previously undetected cellular changes associated with the development of blood cancer and disruptions to the brain's protective barrier. Her discoveries open up new possibilities for earlier diagnosis and a better understanding of serious diseases.