Prof. Peter Csermely gave a lecture named “Determination of overlapping network communities and their implications from marketing to drug design “at AMSS on Oct. 21, 2013.

 In his talk, he introduced that the multidisciplinary group used the general properties of networks as ‘highways’ making the transfer of concepts between various disciplines rather easy. This allowed the utilization of the ‘wisdom’ of biological systems surviving crisis events for many billions of years. Studies showed that community-bridging nodes played a particularly important role in adaptive processes. In yeast stress inter-community contacts were maintained and developed by key proteins of cell survival. They proposed to call highly dynamic community-bridging nodes as creative nodes in 2008. These nodes could be identified by their efficiency in perturbation-propagation. Network-based drug targets were often hubs, i.e. central nodes of the networks. However, most diseases affect differentiated cells, which had rigid networks. Rigid networks needed to be attacked at their most plastic segments, which were in the neighborhood of the most central network nodes.

He concluded that community-bridging nodes emerged as novel regulators of adaptation, evolvability, as well as important targets from marketing strategies to drug design.

Dr. Péter Csermely is the professor at Semmelweis University’s Department of Medical Chemistry, Molecular Biology and Path biochemistry, Semmelweis University. He made great achievements in biological chemistry, systems biology, complex networks and so on. Dr. Csermely is president of the National Talent Support Council in Hungary, and was elected president of the European Council for High Ability (ECHA) in September 2012.He received the Gábor Dénes Award in 2013.