Cancer Bioinformatics

Why we focus on cancer bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary area involving biological, statistical and computational sciences. Bioinformatics enables cancer researchers not only to manage, analyse, mine and understand the currently accumulated, valuable, high-throughput data, but also to integrate these in their current research programmes. Technological advances in the analysis of DNA, RNA, proteins, cells and tissues have accelerated the field of translational bioinformatics in recent years, producing large amounts of data, reflecting the complexity of biological systems.

What we do
  • We work alongside clinical and basic scientists to support the cancer projects within BCI.  This is an ideal partnership between scientific experts, who know the research questions that will be relevant from a cancer biologist or clinician’s perspective, and bioinformatics experts, who know how to develop the proposed methods to provide answers.
  • We conduct independent bioinformatics research, focussing on the development of computational and integrative methods, algorithms, databases and tools to tackle the analysis of the high volumes of cancer data.
  • We are actively involved in the development of bioinformatics educational courses at BCI. Our courses offer a unique opportunity for biologists to gain a basic understanding in the use of bioinformatics methods to access and harness large complicated high-throughput data and uncover meaningful information that could be used to understand molecular mechanisms and develop novel targeted therapeutics/diagnostic tools.
Major Funders
Major Funders
  • Breast Cancer Now
  • Cancer Research UK
  • Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund
  • Barts Charity
  • EPSRC
Key Publications

Image credit: François-Joseph Lapointe, Université de Montréal. CC BY