Dr. Marmar Moussa

Asst Prof of Medicine

UConn Health, Farmington: Neag Cancer Center School of Medicine

Current Research Interests:
Bioinformatics
Computational Genomics
Machine Learning Algorithms
Single Cell Omics
Computational methods and algorithms development
Cancer Immunotherapy Data Analytics

Current Research Projects:
Machine Learning Algorithms for Single Cell Omics:
Advances in cell capturing technologies as well as whole-genome and whole-transcriptome amplification are allowing for the sequencing of the minute amounts of DNA and RNA from a single cell.
An unprecedented window into the extent and nature of genomic and transcriptomic heterogeneity under both normal and disease conditions is now open and single-cell approaches stand poised to revolutionize our capability to understand the scale of genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic diversity that occurs during the lifetime of an individual organism.
It is my continuing goal to study the major technological and biological breakthroughs achieved in this field and actively address the remaining challenges in computational methods and algorithms development related to this field.

Cancer Immunotherapy Data Analytics:
Identification of neoepitopes that are effective in cancer therapy is a major challenge in creation of cancer vaccines. But for the identification methods to be robust a computational approach is needed to evaluate the features that make an effective anticancer neoepitopes. In our latest research a finding identified strikingly different properties from conventional epitopes and suggests a novel set of algorithms might be needed to predict them. It also reveals that current methods of prediction discard the majority of true anticancer neoepitopes. This topic is currently one of my major research focus areas.