Michal Kloc

Michal Kloc

A physicist who has found his mission in biology and medicine

Biography

My Mission

I am a data scientist working in computational cancer biology. I am especially interested in digging through complex datasets to find insights that can ultimately lead to better therapies for patients. This definitely isn’t a solo mission. Modern biology is incredibly complex, so I work closely with molecular biologists, immunologists, and clinicians. Together, we design experiments, analyse the data and try to understand the underlying principles of cancer progression and translate them into clinics.

I am part of Momo Bentires-Alj research lab, and also a member of Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in the group of Robert Ivanek.

I am one of the founders of RXcel, a start-up where we aim at designing “smart” therapeutic RNAs to target aggressive solid tumors.

Next to the world of math, biology and data, there is another one that completely immerses me from time to time, and that’s music. You can listen to some of my production on Soundcloud.

My Interests

There are roughly four main areas I am currently particularly interested in

  • What can we learn about cell-cell interactions in single-cell data how can we overlay multiple modalities, mainly with spatially-resolved data.

  • How can we infer reliably kinase activities from phosphoproteomic data to help identify novel therapeutic targets.

  • How dynamical pattens in intracellular signaling determine cell fate or how precisely we can model transcriptional regulation from sparse time-resolved sequencing or qPCR data.

  • How “smart” RNA design allows to control optimal delivery profile of the effector protein.

For more details, see the Project section.

My Journey

I studied Physics at Charles University in Prague. My field of study was Nuclear and Subnuclear Physics. For my PhD I joint the group of Prof. Pavel Cejnar where I specialized in Computational Quantum Physics of Many-Body Systems. After my PhD I was a visiting scientist at Technical University in Berlin and then I moved to Basel in 2019. I started as a post-doc in the group of Prof. Christoph Bruder where we worked on optimal control using tools of scientific machine learning. In 2021, I made a career shift towards biology and joined the lab of Prof. Momo Bentires-Alj. In 2023, I co-founded RXcel.