The interests of our school’s researchers in the biohealth arena range from genome and proteome analysis, regulatory networks, and biomarker discovery, to managing specific disease modalities such as cancer, HIV, diabetes, and opioid addiction. Utilizing medical data, they apply innovative technology and develop digital tools to improve patient health care.
BioHealth Research
DNA to RNA
Funded by a $1.9M NIH grant, Sarath Janga and his team explore factors that control proteins which translate DNA to RNA, and develop technologies for dissecting RNA-protein interactions in cells. To date, more than 160 unique RNA modifications have been documented. Resulting epitranscriptomes act like cellular traffic signals, turning access to RNA on or off—a phenomenon Janga’s lab explores using single-molecule sequencing and deep learning approaches.
Omics Integration
Multi-omic data and systems biology networks—genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome—hold the potential for discovering new disease mechanisms and markers for designing new drugs and treatment protocols, but the large, complex data sets are difficult to harness. With NSF CRII grant funding, Jingwen Yan has developed a novel, data-intensive computational framework to analyze and integrate the data and networks, create predictive models, and reveal their associations.