Dr. Cenk Sahinalp, Associate professor with the School of Computing Science, and Canada Research Chair in Computational Genomics has been awarded the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Biomedical Research Scholar Award for his research on “RNA structure and interaction prediction”. His research focuses on detecting, predicting the structure and functionality of antisense RNAs with possible applications to regulatory RNA design.

Dr. Sahinalp feels that, “small regulatory RNAs provide one of the most promising directions for future drug development.” Antisense techniques are used to deactivate disease-causing or undesirable genes so that they cannot produce harmful or unwanted proteins. 

Even though the discovery of naturally occurring regulatory RNAs were a breakthrough in science in the year 2002, Dr. Sahinalp says there are still many unresolved questions about the structure and the functionality of a vast majority of RNAs. His research aims to help molecular biologists understand how RNAs form stable secondary structures and how they interact among themselves. This would in turn help in the development of a potentially powerful drug design technology.     

The Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (MSFHR) recognizes Dr. Sahinalp’s research in bioinformatics as part of its mandate to build capacity for health research excellence in B.C. and hence has awarded him with this prestigious award.  

Dr. Sahinalp is happy that MSFHR is supporting bioinformatics research “especially that with a computer science flavor”. He feels that the bioinformatics community in Vancouver is maturing and improving considerably in its visibility and impact in the general biomedical research community. 

Congratulations to Dr. Sahinalp and we wish him all the best with his future research. 

To learn more about Dr.Sahinalp, please visit: http://www.cs.sfu.ca/people/Faculty/Profile/cenk.html

Written by - Salima Vastani