Community Trust Endowment Fund (CTEF) Award to Research in Bioinformatics for Combating Infectious Diseases

Dr. Cenk Sahinalp and his colleagues' proposed research on “Bioinformatics for Combating Infectious Diseases: Novel Methods for Drug and Target Identification and Evaluation” has been recently awarded with a grant as a result of the Second Round of SFU CTEF Grant Competition. For full list of the research team, please visit, http://www.sfu.ca/vpresearch/CTEF/ctef.html_.

Infectious diseases are a leading cause of productivity loss and are responsible for roughly a third of annual deaths worldwide. As antimicrobial resistance increases rapidly newly emerging diseases cause considerable concern; a new global pandemic could have a significant economic impact.

As whole-genome sequencing technologies become widely available, there is hope that genomic knowledge will speed the development of new antimicrobials, vaccines and diagnostics. Success in this direction will largely rely on developing computational screens for accurately identifying potential drug targets and vaccine components.

Dr. Sahinalp and his colleagues' interdisciplinary approach aims to develop accurate and fast bioinformatics algorithms and tools for identifying anti-infective drug targets, candidate drugs and potential vaccines. The proposal brings together computational, physical, chemical and biological scientists towards the common goal of discovering potentially new therapeutic targets and testing them first /in silico/ and then in the laboratory.

For more information on Dr. Sahinalp, please visit: http://www.cs.sfu.ca/people/Faculty/Profile/cenk.html