Big data to improve medicine and healthcare.
Big data to understand human development. Big data to uncover the secrets of life.
At the University of Maryland, a unique
multidisciplinary center is advancing new science and knowledge
arising from the genome revolution. For the first time, we can take
massive amounts of data and we can pull new principles and a new understanding of how living beings interact.
The Center for Bioinformatics and Computational
Biology, known as CBCB, brings together researchers from computer science,
molecular biology, genomics, genetics
mathematics,
statistics and physics. Together, they are combining big data and biology to better treat disease
promote healthier lives and understand how the world around us has evolved. The mission is
to try and make sense of these huge amounts of data that are now generated in biomedical research and
apply the most cutting-edge quantitative analysis approaches that we have to interpret this data into
meaningful insights and results.
Whether it's cholera in Haiti,
intestinal parasites in Africa or
bacteria that can make children in developing countries gravely ill,
researchers in CBCB are using the power of computational biology to identify causes and offer solutions.
My lab focuses on combining
computational approaches with wet bench experimentation.
Essentially what we do is we collect and analyze large
amounts of genetic data from the pathogens that
infect human beings—on which genes they turn on and they turn off as they infect the human host.
We collect data on the genes that the human host turns on and turns off in response to the infection.
One of the big projects we have in our lab has been a study of diarrhea in children in developing countries.
More children died of diarrhea in these countries than HIV, measles and malaria combined. We are developing new
computational techniques that allow us to
decide which of these bacteria might possibly cause diarrhea or which of these bacteria might protect the children against diarrhea.
CBCB is part of a multi-institutional study focused on regulatory science for tobacco.
We're providing expertise and big data management and biostatistics
to better understand the physical and psychological effects of new products like e-cigarettes.
We're also using high-throughput genomic sequencing to glean new knowledge on how organisms develop.
My group will be focused on the evolution of a folding structure that forms in the fruit fly. We'll be studying its
evolutionary past in a lineage of flies and we'll be studying its potential capacity for future evolution. A
fundamental question in evolutionary biology is to understand how structures like organs and limbs
actually evolved. This research will help us understand how that happened.
Other faculty are looking at genetic changes in cells that can lead to cancer,
diabetes, Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's
The broad, million-dollar question in the in the field of biomedicine is how does an individual's genome
determine the person's susceptibility to different diseases? How do specific genes get turned on? Ultimately, everything
hinges on that process as to what makes it manifest itself into a phenotype or a disease or what have you.
CBCB is also using big data to identify genetic markers that can pinpoint new
therapeutic treatments. The main driving force of my research these days is that it's translational.
I'm focused on cancer and mainly on
identifying new drug targets to treat cancer. The main problem
we have now with the development of anti-cancer drugs
is that there is tremendous success initially, but then because cancer is heterogeneous, clonal resistant develops.
The University of Maryland is located just outside of Washington,
D.C.,
allowing CBCB faculty and students to interact with scientists at the National
Institutes of Health and its National Cancer Institute. Other research involves the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration and the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
These partnerships are especially valuable to the Center's graduate students, who
constantly bring a wealth of new knowledge and new ideas to the table.
I don't think any project is successful without a really keen, really intelligent graduate student driving it.
For certain projects that we've been doing in collaboration with other
faculty at CBCB, it has really been a set of graduate students—a team of graduate
students—who have been really driving those forward and making those successful.
Cutting-edge research to treat disease.
Computational strength to identify health risks. A
deeper understanding of who we are and where we came from.
At CBCB, the tools that are available
allow
stretching the imagination, stretching the mind. We all seek to understand how life works.
How do you determine the characteristics of an organism from its genome? That question is
extremely complex, and it's not been possible to answer that question until now.
Within the next decade or so,
there will be answers to such long-standing
questions and we want to be the leaders in answering these questions.
