Computational Systems Biology of Cancer
Master in Life Sciences, ENS – M2
2026-2027 - Semester 1
UNBIO1-085/UNBIO1-126 - Computational Systems Biology of Cancer (Curie/ENS)/+ Computational project
3 to 9 ECTS
—2026-2027 program and applications to come—
Year and Semester : M2 | S1
Where : Institut Curie, Paris (first week) - Biology Department, ENS (second & third weeks)
Duration : 1 week (35h) + 2 weeks of computational projects (optional, selective, 70h)
First and last day of class : September 21st-25th, 2026 (course) + two weeks for projects, (October 5th-16th)
Hours : 09:00-12:30 | 14:00-17:30 (susceptible to change)
Maximum class size : 16 IMaLiS students
This course is open to external students (PhD and Postdocs).
Coordination
Loredana Martignetti, Institut Curie
Denis Thieffry, École normale supérieure
Credits
3 ECTS for the first week course (UNBIO1-085)
6 ECTS for the computational project (UNBIO1-126)
Keywords
Cancer | Systems biology | Computational biology | Genomics | Proteomics | Transcriptomics | Tissue imaging | Machine learning Cancer | Artificial Intelligence
Course prerequisites
M1 level knowledge of genetics, genomics, and cellular and molecular biology for the course.
Bases of python or R programming for the computational project.
Course objectives and description
Aims The objective of the course is to promote better integration of computational approaches into biological and clinical research labs and clinical practice. We aim to help participants to understand and use multimodal integration approaches to efficiently exploit the various kinds of data accumulating in most biological or medical laboratories.
Themes : More specific topics include multimodal genomic data integration and analysis, drug sensitivity prediction algorithms, identification of biomarkers and cancer drivers, patient stratification, and applications of mathematical modelling and image analysis in cancer. This edition of the course will further focus on recent novel generative artificial intelligence (genAI) approaches, as well as on the development of foundation models for biology and health.
Organisation : The course (granting 3 ECTS) is organized at Institut Curie (Paris) over a full week. Leading speakers from different fields in cancer systems biology, cancer research and clinics, will present various approaches for omics, imaging, clinical data analysis and interpretation, combining signalling networks together with multi-scale molecular data, further associating with clinical data.
IMaLiS M2 students (exclusively) can further apply for computational project (granting 6 ECTS and taking place during the following weeks), based on the content of the article presented during the first week.
Assessment
• The evaluation of the first week is based on the oral presentation of an article related to the topics of the course. Article assignment is organised before the start of the course, while the presentations take place on the afternoons of Thursday and Friday during the course week.
• The evaluation of the projects is based on the production of a computational notebook (in python and/or R) and on an oral presentation and discussion at the end of the last week.
Course material
The schedule and all slides will be made available on Institut Curie’s training website.
Suggested readings in relation with the module content
Barillot E, Calzone L, Hupe P, Vert J-P, Zinovyev A (2013). Computational Systems Biology of Cancer. CRC Press.
