More information about Brandon Bongers

"I started my bachelor degree of Biopharmaceutical Sciences in february 2010 at Leiden Univserity, following a year of informatics in Delft. In my last year of my bachelor, I did an internship at the Medicinal Chemistry at the LACDR, concerning the modeling and docking of CCR2 ligands and receptor, which was overseen by Dr. Lenselink. After finishing my bachelor, I started my master Biopharmaceutical Sciences with a 9-month internship at the same Medicinal Chemistry group, this time under supervision by Dr. van Westen and Dr.  Lenselink. The main focus of this internship was the evaluation of several open-source cheminformatics approaches. Following this, I attended a 6-month internship at the LUMC at the Biosemantics group of Human Genetics, under supervision of Dr. Schultes. The goal here was the exploration of integrating two different data sets with a small subset of common properties to one larger dataset, and detailing strategies to exploit the extra relationships.

After obtaining my Masters degree, I returned to the Medicinal Chemistry group to start my PhD in Prof. IJzerman’s group, in the computational division of Dr. van Westen. There I will work on a data-driven exploration of somatic mutations, with a focus on Solute Carriers (SLCs). Goals of this exploration include finding the limitations of bioactivity modeling, finding noval ligands inhibiting SLC membrane proteins in cancer types and mutation analysis. This may ultimately lead to an optimization of cheminformatics approaches in drug research and can reveal certain patterns in somatic mutations that may lead to new drug leads."

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