DocTIS innovative data integration approach introduced to 500 bioinformatics professionals
DocTIS took part in the XV Symposium on Bioinformatics (JBI2025), held from 22 to 24 October 2025 at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The symposium brought together around 500 participants, including scientists, students and professionals from Spain, Portugal and other European countries, to discuss advances in bioinformatics and computational biology.
During the event, Sergio H. Martínez, machine learning scientist at IMIDomics Inc., presented the poster “Uncovering combination therapies for immune-mediated inflammatory diseases through systems biology analysis on longitudinal patient data”. The work attracted attention for its strong data-driven design, new methodology and the size and diversity of the patient cohort involved.
Advancing systems biology research in IMIDs
The study presented at JBI2025 is the result of collaboration among all DocTIS scientific partners: Vall d’Hebron Research Institute, VHIR (Sara Marsal), Cardiff University (Ernest Choy), the University of Verona (Giampiero Girolomoni), Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Britta Siegmund), the Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer, IDIBAPS (Pere Santamaria), the National Center for Genomic Analysis, CNAG (Holger Heyn), IMIDomics Inc. (Manuel Lopez-Figueroa), and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology (Richard M. Myers).
Using bulk and single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-Seq) data from 176 patients affected by six immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and systemic lupus erythematosus), the research team applied a systems biology approach to explore how longitudinal molecular data can reveal new therapeutic opportunities.
Among the key findings, the combination of anti-TNFalpha and anti-IL6R therapies was identified as a promising strategy for rheumatoid arthritis, showing molecular complementarity, validation across independent datasets and potential to address treatment resistance.
The study also stands out as an example of how bioinformatics can transform clinical research. By integrating multi-omics data, computational modelling and longitudinal patient information across six diseases, the project demonstrates the potential of data science to uncover new biological insights and guide therapeutic innovation in immune-mediated diseases. For the bioinformatics community, DocTIS illustrates how combining large-scale data integration with predictive modelling can bridge the gap between molecular biology and real-world clinical applications.
A meeting point for the bioinformatics community
Organised by the National Center for Biotechnology (CNB-CSIC), the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO), BioData.pt, and the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB/ELIXIR-ES), the symposium is recognised as one of the most important annual events for bioinformatics research in the Iberian Peninsula.
Its programme included four keynote lectures, around forty oral presentations and more than one hundred and fifty posters, offering participants a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in computational biology and data science.
Insights from JBI2025
According to Sergio H. Martínez, attending JBI2025 provided valuable insights into the broader European bioinformatics ecosystem. In particular, he highlighted the ELIXIR infrastructure, a European network that connects life science data resources across countries and promotes open, standardised and interoperable data management.
He also noted the growing importance of Nextflow, a workflow manager that enables reproducible and scalable data analysis, and nf-core, a collection of community-developed, best-practice pipelines widely used in bioinformatics. Both tools are contributing to greater consistency and collaboration in computational research across Europe.
