Research

The Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology is one of the premier programs in computational cancer genomics and medicine in the world, and it has been a major player in various cancer consortium projects such as The Cancer Genome Atlas , the International Cancer Genome Consortium , and the NCI Information Technology for Cancer Research program. Our faculty study sequencing analysis, proteomics, statistical genetics, functional genomics, perturbation biology, single cell analysis, tumor evolution, and cellular and molecular mechanisms of cancer development and drug resistance, and develop widely used computational algorithms and bioinformatics tools.

Current research projects:

• A Specialized Genomic Data Center for the detection, quantitation, interpretation, and correction of batch effects in molecular profiling data on cancers , as part of the NIH’s Genomic Data Analysis Network (GDAN).
• A Specialized Genomic Data Center for the integrated analysis of protein expression data from the Reverse Phase Protein Array (RPPA) platform , as part of the NIH’s Genomic Data Analysis Network (GDAN).
• Next-Generation Clustered Heat Maps
• The Cancer Proteome Atlas
• Metabatch
• Combining drug sensitivity results with gene expression profiles
• Discovering and validating cancer signatures in reverse-phase protein lysate array (RPPA) data
• Analysis of methylation arrays
• Searching for alternative splicing using exon arrays
• Sample size computations for microarray and proteomics profiling experiments
• Low-level processing of mass spectrometry proteomics data

Many faculty also have small wet-labs to supplement their quantitative research programs.

Collaborative Research

MD Anderson offers excellent opportunities for collaboration with clinicians, allowing investigators to translate their fundamental research to the cancer problem.

Bioinformatics Shared Resource

The department hosts MD Anderson’s Bioinformatics Shared Resource (BISR) (Director: John Weinstein, Co-director: Jing Wang). The BISR is partially funded by the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, through the Cancer Center Support Grant, P30 CA016672.

The BISR provides consultative services for and conducts collaborative research with clinical and basic science departments and enhances quantitative methods through innovative research in genomics, proteomics, molecular and cellular biology, radiotherapy, computer-assisted diagnoses, and image analysis.