Ekta Khurana

Assistant Professor of Computational Genomics
Meyer Cancer Center

Weill Cornell Medical - New York City

Interests: Cancer, Computational Biology, Genetics / Genomics

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The research interests of the lab fall under the broad categories of genomics, computational biology and systems biology. We participate in multiple international genomics consortia and collaborate with scientists at multiple institutes to develop novel approaches to understand the role of sequence variants in human disease. The decreasing costs of genome sequencing are leading to a growing repertoire of personal genomes. However, we are lagging behind in understanding the functional consequences of the millions of variants obtained from sequencing. This is also the case for somatic variants in cancer. An average cancer genome contains thousands of somatic variants – but the functional implications of these variants on cancer progression and growth are not clear. We develop integrative computational models to understand the relationship between genomic sequence variation and disease. The impact of sequence variants in non-protein-coding regions of the genome is especially less-well-understood. We have developed multiple computational approaches (for example, FunSeq and RegNetDriver) that integrate large-scale data from multiple resources to identify the DNA point mutations and rearrangements in protein-coding genes and non-coding regulatory regions leading to human disease, in particular cancer.