Professor Kiran Patil

Kiran studied Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (Mumbai, India). He moved to the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) to work with Prof. Jens Nielsen and obtained his PhD in Systems Biology. Kiran was then appointed as Assistant Professor at DTU where he worked on transcriptional regulation and metabolic engineering. In 2010, Kiran joined the Structural and Computational Biology Unit at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-Heidelberg, Germany). He was appointed Director of Research at the MRC Toxicology Unit in 2019, and appointed as Professor of Molecular Systems Biology in October 2022.

An adult individual typically harbours a few hundred grams of bacteria in their digestive tract. Recent findings have brought forward the fundamental role of this microbiota in determining drug efficacy, mode of action and side effects. Yet, such interactions at the microbiome level remain unknown for the vast majority of the drugs and for other xenobiotics that we are exposed to (e.g. food contaminants like pesticides). The overarching goal of Kiran’s research programme is to discover and model complex (xeno-) metabolic networks emerging in the gut microbiota and thereby gain mechanistic insights into microbiome-mediated toxicity. To this end, this interdisciplinary programme brings together computational (metabolic modelling, bioinformatics, chemo-informatics and machine learning) and experimental (in vitro microbiomics, metabolomics and chemical genomics) approaches.