The sixth call for “Vienna Research Groups for Young Investigators”, a founding programme of the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWFT) addresses Vienna based research institutions that intend to hire an excellent young researcher from abroad. This year, it was awarded to Jörg Menche, who will establish a new research group at CeMM to promote the emerging field of network medicine to investigate rare diseases. 

The topic of this year´s WWTF´s founding call “Computational Biosciences” appeared all but customized to Jörg Menche´s scientific focus: A theoretical physicist by training, he works since his postdoc period on computational methods to study molecular networks of biological systems that are involved in diseases. The well founded and prestigious grant will help him establish a research group at CeMM to study rare monogenetic and complex human diseases and develop new approaches for precise diagnostics and therapies.

Recent advances in high-throughput technologies like next-generation sequencing of genomes, epigenomes and transcriptomes, proteomics and chemical screening have created exciting new opportunities for this kind of research. The vast amounts of data they produce allow unpresented insights into molecular details of biological systems, but pose simultaneously a big challenge to bioinformatics to exploit its full potential.

Jörg Menche will address that problem with a newly emerging approach called ‘network medicine’: It applies tools and concepts from network theory, a discipline at the interface of mathematics, physics and informatics to analyze the biomedical data produced by high-through put methods. With this approach, Menche and his collaborators at CeMM and the medical university Vienna will study the molecular networks involved in rare diseases, focusing on the relationships between genes, proteins and metabolic processes which differ between healthy and diseased cells.

The scientific education of Jörg Menche started in Leipzig, where he studied physics. His interest in statistical and computational physics lead him to Recife and Berlin before starting PhD with Reinhard Lipowsky at the Max-Planck-Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam. He was a postdoctoral fellow with Albert-László Barabási at Northeastern University and at the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. His newly founded group within the highly collaborative and translationally-minded environment at CeMM will prove as immense enrichment for the institute and constitute a broad and substantial contribution to network medicine.