Dr. Ziaurrehman Tanoli – Drug repurposing – Best Researcher Award

University of Helsinki, Finland

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🎓Educational Background 

Dr. Tanoli completed his MS leading to PhD in Machine Learning at PIEAS and holds a Bachelor’s in Computer and Information Sciences from the same institution. In 2022, he was awarded the title of Docent in Pharmaceutical Chemistry by the University of Helsinki.

🏢Work Experience 

Dr. Tanoli has an extensive academic background, with experience in several prestigious institutions. Currently, he holds a position as a Senior Researcher at FIMM, and has previously served as an Associate Professor at the University of Helsinki. His prior roles include postdoctoral positions at FIMM, University of Helsinki, and the University of Sannio, Italy. He has also served as an Assistant Professor at COMSATS University Islamabad in Pakistan.

🏆Achievements 

Dr. Ziaurrehman Tanoli has established himself as an exceptional scientist, completing his PhD at the age of 27. His research has been widely recognized, with one of his most significant accomplishments being the publication of an article as the first author in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (Impact Factor: 122). He co-organized the IDG-DREAM challenge, which was featured in Nature Communications in 2021. Dr. Tanoli also made notable strides in research challenges, such as winning the CTD2Pancancer Drug Activity Dream Challenge (CRM, 2022) and the CTD2Pancancer Chemosensitivity Dream Challenge (publication pending). His grant funding achievements include securing the AoF Project Funding (2022–2026) for €0.58M to support his project on drug repurposing and receiving a Young Researchers Grant (2023) from the Aaltonen Foundation for €37K. Furthermore, he has been awarded the MSCA SE EU Mobility Grant for €29K for the years 2025-2028.

🔬Research Expertise 

Dr. Tanoli specializes in AI-driven drug discovery, focusing on a variety of areas such as attention-based models, large language models, and generative AI for software development. His expertise extends to target-based drug discovery and repurposing, where he developed methods for predicting drug-target interactions across 7 protein superfamilies. He has also made significant contributions to phenotypic drug discovery, including multi-omics-based drug response prediction and synergistic drug combination identification. Dr. Tanoli has published 27 articles in the last five years, with 13 of them as corresponding or first author. His work has also expanded into the development of drug repurposing pipelines and drug safety analysis models.

💡Research Grants & Projects 

Throughout his career, Dr. Tanoli has secured numerous research grants and project funding for innovative drug discovery solutions. His projects span topics such as drug repurposing, AI models for drug discovery, and multi-omics analysis. The AoF Project (2022-2026) received €0.58M, and his other prestigious projects include the REMEDI4ALL EU Project (2022-2027) and EOSC-Life EU Project (2019-2023).

👩‍🏫Teaching & Supervision 

With over 300 contact hours of teaching, Dr. Tanoli has actively contributed to educational development. He has taught various topics related to pharmaceutical chemistry, machine learning, and bioinformatics. His dedication to mentorship is also evident through his supervision of 3 PhD students, 4 research assistants, 2 software developers, and 1 postdoc.

Notable Publications📝

📝Computational drug repurposing: approaches, evaluation of in silico resources and case studies

• • Authors: Ziaurrehman Tanoli, Adrià Fernández-Torras, Umut Onur Özcan, Aleksandr Kushnir, Kristen Michelle Nader, Yojana Gadiya, Laura Fiorenza, Aleksandr Ianevski, Markus Vähä-Koskela, Mitro Miihkinen et al.

  • Journal: Nature Reviews Drug Discovery

  • Year: 2025

📝Validation guidelines for drug-target prediction methods

• • Authors: Ziaurrehman Tanoli, Aron Schulman, Tero Aittokallio

  • Journal: Expert Opinion on Drug Discovery

  • Year: 2025

📝Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Drug Repurposing—Challenges and Perspectives

• • Authors: Ezequiel Anokian, Judith Bernett, Adrian Freeman, Markus List, Lucía Prieto Santamaría, Ziaurrehman Tanoli, Sarah Bonnin

  • Journal: Drug Repurposing

  • Year: 2024

📝PGxDB: An interactive web-platform for pharmacogenomics research

• • Authors: Trinh Trung Duong Nguyen, Ziaurrehman Tanoli, Saad Hassan, Umut Özcan, Jimmy Caroli, Albert Kooistra, David Gloriam, Alexander Hauser

  • Journal: Nucleic Acids Research

  • Year: 2024

📝Attention-based approach to predict drug–target interactions across seven target superfamilies

• • Authors: Aron Schulman, Juho Rousu, Tero Aittokallio, Ziaurrehman Tanoli, Xin Gao

  • Journal: Bioinformatics

  • Year: 2024