An Early Stage Researcher's Primer on Systems Medicine Terminology

Background: Systems Medicine is a novel approach to medicine, i.e. an interdisciplinary field that considers the human body as a system, composed of multiple parts and of complex relationships at multiple levels, and further integrated into an environment. Exploring Systems Medicine implies understanding and combining concepts coming from diametral different fields, including medicine, biology, statistics, modelling and simulation, and data science. Such heterogeneity leads to semantic issues, which may slow down implementation and fruitful interaction between these highly diverse fields.

A genome-wide study on differential methylation in different cancers using TCGA database

Background: DNA methylation is the main epigenetic mechanism driving changes in phenotype without altering genotype. Since the end of the seventies the role of methylation in cancer has become increasingly clear. Objective: The aim of this work is to shed light on the impact of methylation events on cancer cells, providing evidence that differential methylation in small regions, mostly characterized by hypermethylation, affects gene regulation while differential methylation in large genomic regions, mostly characterized by hypomethylation, affects chromosomal organization.

Potential predictors of type-2 diabetes risk: machine learning, synthetic data and wearable health devices

Investigation about the mechanisms involved in the onset of type 2 diabetes in absence of familiarity is the focus of a research project which has led to the development of a computational model that recapitulates the aetiology of the disease. The model simulates the metabolic and immunological alterations related to type-2 diabetes associated to several clinical, physiological and behavioural characteristics of representative virtual patients.

Information disorders during the COVID-19 infodemic: The case of Italian Facebook

The recent COVID-19 pandemic came alongside with an "infodemic", with online social media flooded by often unreliable information associating the medical emergency with popular subjects of disinformation. In Italy, one of the first European countries suffering a rise in new cases and dealing with a total lockdown, controversial topics such as migrant flows and the 5G technology were often associated online with the origin and diffusion of the virus.

Diffusive limit of a two-dimensional well-balanced approximation to a kinetic model of chemotaxis

A (2+2)-dimensional kinetic equation, directly inspired by the run-and-tumble modeling of chemotaxis dynamics is studied so as to derive a both ''2D well-balanced'' and ''asymptotic-preserving'' numerical approximation. To this end, exact stationary regimes are expressed by means of Laplace transforms of Fourier-Bessel solutions of associated elliptic equations. This yields a scattering S-matrix which permits to formulate a timemarching scheme in the form of a convex combination in kinetic scaling.