Two NRI researchers receive CIBR Center seed grant

Two researchers from the Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s – Drs. Mirjana Maletic-Savatic and Zhandong Liu – are among the recipients of Baylor College of Medicine’s Computational and Integrative Biomedical Research Center’s (CIBR) seed grants for Fiscal Year 2015.

Maletic-Savatic is an assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor and Rivka Colen is an assistant professor of radiology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Their grant titled, “Radiome sequencing in autism,” will map autistic brains at the level of microns using newly developed algorithms for structural MRI analysis. Such radiome mapping will provide unprecedented molecular, cellular and histological/pathological insights into autism, leading to development of new tools for early diagnosis and new therapies for the disorder.

Baylor faculty members Dr. Zhandong Liu, assistant professor of pediatrics, and Dr. Matthew Anderson, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology, received an award-winning grant titled, “Network guided multi-outcome models for cancer genomics,” that aims to identify cancer biomarkers from genomics data to predict multiple types of clinical outcomes, such as overall survival and response to treatment.

CIBR Center helps students and faculty address the broad range of analytical problems posed by the complexity of high throughput biological datasets. The Center’s mission is to bridge the translational gap from data to models and from models to drug discovery and personalized therapy.

CIBR Center awards six grants of $15,000 each year to foster collaborations between two or more labs within Baylor. The awards are intended to advance the Center’s mission by using original statistical or computational approaches to solve biological and clinical problems.

Other Fiscal Year 2015 recipients and their grant proposals were:

• Drs. Neil Hanchard and Yongtao Guan, “Patterns of haplotype variation in sickle cell disease patients”
• Drs. Zulfi Haneef, Harvey Levin and Marina Vannucci, “Connectome based integration of fcMRI and DTI to define epileptogenic zones”
• Drs. Wei Li, Joel Neilson and Zheng Xia, “Computational and experimental modeling of alternative polyadenylation in human diseases”
• Drs. Qianxing Mo and Keith Chan, “Continuous Development of Statistical Methods for Integrative Analysis of Multi-type Genomic Data and Their Application in Identification of Bladder Cancer Subtypes and Subtype-specific Gene Signatures”