Gökhan Ertaylan
R&D
Dr. Gökhan Ertaylan is a distinguished expert in Bioinformatics and Genomics, having earned his MSc from Utrecht University in 2006. Driven by a passion for computational biology, he completed his PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 2011. During his doctoral studies at the Computational Systems Biology Laboratory, he co-developed a personalised decision support system for HIV patients and created the first HIV-human protein interaction network.
After earning his PhD, Dr. Ertaylan joined the Luxembourg Center for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) at the University of Luxembourg as a Marie Curie Grant Fellow. There, he focused on Anoikis Resistance in Breast Cancer Metastasis. In 2015, he transitioned to the Maastricht Center for Systems Biology (MACSBIO) at Maastricht University as a senior researcher, further establishing his reputation as a leading expert in systems understanding in human health and disease.
Currently, Dr. Ertaylan is a principal investigator at VITO, where he leads the Digital Precision Health group. This group specialises in two critical areas: digital twins in healthcare and innovations in regulatory science in medical device software. Dr. Ertaylan’s team, comprising about 15 dedicated researchers, is at the forefront of developing and testing innovative applications aimed at revolutionising personalised medicine. Their work on digital twins involves creating virtual models to simulate and predict health outcomes, thereby enhancing prevention, detection, and treatment strategies. The team also focuses on establishing regulatory frameworks for medical and AI-driven software to ensuring transparency, standardisation, safety, and efficacy for all stakeholders.
Dr. Ertaylan has led the “I am Frontier” cohort study, which involved deep phenotyping of 30 healthy individuals to understand transitions between health and disease. He also co-leads the Horizon Europe-funded project REALM (Real-world-data Enabled Assessment for Health Regulatory Decision-Making) and is a partner in several other projects, including EDITH, DigiTwins4PH, ONCOSCREEN, RAIDO, PRIBE and BGB as well as various national grants. Through his leadership and expertise, Dr. Ertaylan continues to push the boundaries of digital health, striving to improve patient outcomes through cutting-edge computational approaches and collaborative research.
