Qi's Research Featured in Drug Development & Discovery

09-26-2012

An article in the August 2012 issue of Drug Development & Discovery magazine prominently features the research of Yuan (Alan) Qi, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Statistics, and (by courtesy) Biology.

"Bringing Stem Cells to the Forefront" is written by DDD magazine's contributing editor Mike May. It focuses on the many tools and techniques researchers use to exploit the opportunities provided by stem cells to study drug reactions. Specifically, a portion of May's article focuses on combating cancer by identifying and isolating cancer stem cells. Dr. Qi's research into flow cytometry coupled with supercomputing may provide the necessary tools for this.

Qi and his fellow researchers are working on a Bayesian model that can compare cell data from healthy mice to that from mice that have cancer. Quoted by May, Qi notes, "We are trying to find a tiny number of cells in massive flow cytometry data, and that requires lots of number crunching [...] and we utilize a supercomputer to do the analysis fast."

Additionally, this research may also be employed in the discovery of new drugs, to model cellular responses to different medicines.

Yuan Qi has been with the Department of Computer Science since 2007 and he received an NSF Career Award in 2011.

Congratulations to Professor Qi and his team on their press coverage!