20 September 2024 – Imre Gaspar’s EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship helped create the contacts and develop the skills he has used throughout his subsequent career in academia and now in industry. “I learnt a lot, so many things that I used afterwards and even now that I’ve moved out of academia. That was a very important part of my life,” he says.
It was during his EMBO Fellowship at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in 2009 that he recognized the value of bioinformatics to the life sciences: “The amount of data that you collected all of a sudden just exceeded the capacities that you could normally comprehend without bioinformatics tools.”
Now working for Turbine.ai, a cancer start-up in Budapest, Gaspar says bioinformatics have become an essential basic skill for life scientists. “It’s like being able to read. It’s at that level,” he says, adding that the ability to use AI is becoming a similar core skill.
His current work uses AI tools to simulate cancer behaviour. “We use AI models, and we are working to understand why our AI models made that prediction,” he says. “Can we relate that to real life biology?” Gaspar says it is essential to be able to understand how the AI models work, so that predictions can be treated as reliable hypothesis able to be tested in the lab and eventually in a clinic – work he sees as having potentially huge societal benefits.
