With Dr. Anish Thomas (M.B.B.S., M.D.) at Developmental Therapeutics Branch of National Cancer Institutes of National Institutes of Health, I work with the genomic and clinomics data originated from clinical trials of Small Cell Lung Cancer patients, treated with drugs and immunotherapies. At Developmental Therapeutics Branch I lead two projects which focuses on the -
1.) Identification of genomic instability patterns especially fusion genes in Small Cell Lung Cancer patients using WGS, WES, RNA-Seq and Long-Read Sequencing data, with the aim of development of functional genomic screening approach for precision oncology.
2.) Evolution of the epigenomes in Small Cell Lung Cancer patients which undergone several rounds of therapies.
In addition to the above, here at Developmental Therapeutics Branch I work with several colleagues and groups and involved in the data analysis part for their specific questions.
With the bit of genomic exposure during Post-Graduation level, I decided to explore the human genome via computational techniques and thus enrolled myself in Ph.D. program at the CSIR – Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh, India in 2015 under the supervision of Dr. G.P.S. Raghava. My thesis, which is entitled as "Development of computational tools for understanding the genomic instability in healthy and disease associated genomes" is mainly focused on the identification of the genomic instability patterns at the chromosome, DNA and RNA level using publicly available data from literature as well as from the various cancer resources. During my doctoral research, i learn about database development, machine learning techniques and omics data integration for various cancer types. Thesis work can be defined in three major areas -
1.) At Chromosome Level - Where I developed a knowledge-base which harbours the information about critical fragile regions of the human genome.
2.) At DNA Level - Where we identified the misregulation of oncogenes is governed by enhancer elements in pancreatic cancer & as a subpart of this big theme I developed a knowledge-base which provides annotated picture of enhancer elements especially - association with survival, their mutation and CNV and their expression pattern in 18 human cancer types.
3.) At RNA Level - Where I developed a prognostic index model based on the alternative splicing pattern in pancreatic adenocarcinoma, and identified that splicing patterns are better markers compared to others like gene expression, miRNA, lncRNA etc.
Apart form major thesis work - i have been involved in several other projects which specifically focuses on the - designing and validation of cell penetrating peptides for effective therapy/immunotherapeutic for cancer and other infectious diseases; analysis of multi-omics data for biomarker identification; peptide-based therapeutics, designing epitope-based vaccine, developing algorithms for clinical data analysis and interpretation using machine learning for precision medicine.