Imagine that you were recently diagnosed with a form of cancer.  Would you rather go through surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy treatments, which are not always effective and can be very costly, or would you prefer to take a few pills and return to your normal life?  Dr. Sumeet Dua is creating a new way to search the map of the human genome.  By studying gene markers, which act like bookmarks in DNA, drugs can be targeted to specific genetic traits to potentially cure diseases.  Previous data sets that are being used were obtained by the Broad Institute at MIT, a collaboration between MIT, Harvard University, and affiliated hospitals.  Using gene expression profiles of 144 tumor samples from 14 different types of cancer, Dr. Dua’s research is developing novel computer algorithms, or methods for solving complex computational problems, designed to scan thousands of gene expression data for gene markers for specific tumor types.  These algorithms incorporate specially designed data structures that can quickly compare gene sequences.  Thus far, Dr. Dua and his team have published three papers on the subject and plan to publish four or five more in the near future. They are working to create programming algorithms that can quickly search the genome for expression markers without observation by a human expert. Such an algorithm would greatly reduce current search time.

This project is largely in the field of bioinformatics, the application of computer science with biological systems, particularly in genetics.  The applications of bioinformatics range from creating new medicines to understanding genetic expression among humans.  Data mining, or searching large databases for novel information, is related to this research.  With the recent completion of the Human Genome Project, also known as the HGP, a large database of over twenty thousand genes has been sequenced.  By searching these genes for gene markers, of which only a few exist compared to the entire genome, it can be determined in a given sample what genes have been changed from the original human genome.  These gene changes, when found, can be treated and one day possibly corrected, avoiding many unfortunate maladies such as diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and even the many forms of cancer.

Dr. Dua currently has extensive collaborations with several senior researchers at LSU School of Medicine, New Orleans, of which he is an Adjunct Faculty of Research.  Also working on this project are Dr. Hilary Thompson, Dr. Jim Hill, and four graduate students.  The project is currently supported by NIH funded LA-BRIN program, and BORSF, or the Board of Regents Support Fund.  Dr. Dua is also working on several other projects, including one on protein structure alignment wherein researchers endeavor to understand protein structures, which will help to understand their functions.  His team has recently published two papers in this area. 

For additional information about Dr. Dua and his projects, you can visit Dr. Dua’s website at http://www2.latech.edu/~sdua/  and the Louisiana Tech Data Mining Research Lab’s website at http://dmrl.latech.edu/.