The understanding of the biology of diseases has advanced greatly since the application of these modern disciplines in the post-genomic era. It is widely recognized that one system can be explained by the activity of all its components together with their interrelationships, and their relationship with the environment, and not simply the sum of the genes, proteins or metabolites. The integration of data from these fields requires great efforts in the development of common languages, tools, and specific databases and global data. For the integration of "omics" data a new conception of the researcher (or the research teams) is necessary, with knowledge in areas such as “omics”, pathophysiology of disease and bioinformatics modelling.
The platform led by Susana Kalko spent years gaining experience in studies of differential expression in all the "omics" disciplines (specially in the field of transcriptomics and microarrays), as reflected in many publications. These studies typically have two major challenges: the high dimensionality, and usually the small sample size, so it is essential to have sophisticated tools with complex statistical methodologies to extract information and knowledge.
A major current need of the Platform for Bioinformatics is the combination of "omics" complex data within systems biology. To do so, a lot of tools are necessary, based primarily on principles of physical or functional interactions. Such tools allow the design of networks that provide greater biological understanding of the basic functional processes associated to pathologies (especially important in the case of complex diseases such as diabetes, COPD or cardiovascular diseases). New perspectives in research projects are being generated through a bioinformatic approach.