Unleash artificial intelligence on old measurement results and you won’t believe what it adds to your knowledge. This is the promise of systems biologist Lennart Martens, who is a staunch opponent of blinkers.

Unleash artificial intelligence on old measurement results and you won’t believe what it adds to your knowledge. This is the promise of systems biologist Lennart Martens, who is a staunch opponent of blinkers. 

Things went awry when he was given a Commodore 64 computer at the age of eight, Lennart Martens chuckles. ‘After two weeks I was programming in Basic and since then I am a computer nerd in heart and soul.’ The fact that he did not study computer science, he owes to the influence of a few excellent chemistry and biology teachers – and a certain lack of enthusiasm for theoretical mathematics. 

Within the VIB-UGent Center for Medical Biotechnology, Martens heads the computational omics group, abbreviated CompOmics. ‘High-throughput techniques such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics yield so much information that you need software to plough through it’, he explains. It is a very mixed group of computer scientists, physicists, bioengineers and biomedical engineers: some write algorithms, others apply them. But classical bioinformatics, which interprets fresh experimental data, is not the main focus. Instead, they reuse archived data to build models that predict which analytical procedure to use in the next experiment.