Markku Varjosalo

Research Director Markku Varjosalo, PhD, is a systems biologist, and his research focuses on molecular level characterization of signaling pathways in health and disease using proteomics, genomics and structural biology tools. He is a tenured Research Director (Molecular Systems Biology/Pathology research group) and Scientific Director of Protein-Proteome Research within the HiLIFE, University of Helsinki. Varjosalo´s list of original research articles encompasses >100 published articles, with several high impact publications in Nature, Cell and their clones.

During his Ph.D, he cloned >90% of the human protein kinases to facilitate the identification of kinase(s) regulating mammalian signaling pathways. This for example led to the discovery that mammalian Shh signaling pathway has diverged from the Drosophila and that cellular signaling pathways are not immutable. From thereon he has been working with kinases and protein phosphorylation.

His research group has over 10 years of experience also on developing systems biology tools to study the molecular context in which the protein kinases work (such as affinity purification mass spectrometry and proximity labeling approaches), to identify their substrates and quantifiably identify changes in their substrate phosphorylation (quantitative phosphoproteomics). Using these approaches, his group has made important discoveries in the physical and functional characterization of all human protein kinases, human protein phosphatases and transcription factors. These efforts have also led to deciphering the molecular level mechanisms of hundreds of different mutations on tens of human genes, in different diseases such as cancer and immunodeficiency.