معرفی
Prof. Dr. Olga Kalinina leads the Drug Bioinformatics research group at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS). She holds an M.Sc. in Mathematics from Moscow State University (2003) and a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from the Russian Academy of Sciences (2007). Her academic journey includes postdoctoral positions at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and University of Heidelberg, followed by establishing her independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (2012-2018).
Her research program integrates cutting-edge bioinformatics and computational approaches to address challenges in drug discovery and resistance mechanisms. Primary research domains include:
- Development of machine learning tools for predicting functional consequences of genetic variants and drug resistance phenotypes
- Structural bioinformatics approaches for protein-drug interaction analysis
- Graph theory-based investigation of drug-binding pockets
- Protein language models enhanced with 3D structural information
- Explainable AI for drug-target interaction prediction
Her group maintains active research projects on:
- Predicting molecular mechanisms of genetic variants in cardiac/renal diseases (BMBF-funded)
- Investigating off-target drug binding mechanisms (BMBF-funded)
- Antimicrobial resistance discovery using explainable AI (HelmholtzAI-funded)
- Protein structure-informed drug affinity prediction
Prof. Kalinina has received the EMBO Long Term Fellowship and currently supervises seven doctoral students. Her laboratory develops computational resources including novel methods for solvent accessibility estimation (SphereCon), variant annotation in structural context (StructMAn), and protein interaction analysis (DIGGER).
