Rehan Akbani
Associate Professor
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Dr. Rehan Akbani has dedicated himself to working on high-profile large-scale genomics projects such as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and other projects from the Center for Cancer Genomics (CCG) at NCI, with twin emphases on (i) proteomic analysis (principally by reverse-phase proteomic array; RPPA) and (ii) quality control and batch effects mitigation for cancer molecular data sets. He is a Principal Investigator (PI) on several grants from the NCI and DoD. Dr. Akbani leads the bioinformatics analysis and quality control of CCG’s Reverse Phase Protein Array (RPPA) based protein expression data that’s produced by Dr. Gordon Mills’ lab at MD Anderson. He also leads CCG’s overall data quality control and batch effects effort. Besides those projects, Dr. Akbani is the PI on a gastric cancer research project whose goal is to identify disrupted biomarkers and pathways in gastric cancer. The project compares gastric cancer with other GI cancers to gain insights into its biology. Furthermore, Dr. Akbani leads several TCGA projects, notably a Pan-gynecologic cancers effort and a Pan-Cancer TGF-beta pathway project which study molecular aberrations in those tumor types or pathway. Students in his lab can expect to work on such high-profile projects, where they can learn (i) how to work with genomic, proteomic and other molecular data sets, (ii) how to perform quality control and batch effects mitigation in the data, (iii) perform cutting edge bioinformatics research in gastric, gynecologic and other cancers, (iv) study several pathways in detail, such as the TGF-beta pathway.
Publications
- Tumor-intrinsic SIRPA promotes sensitivity to checkpoint inhibition immunotherapy in melanoma
- RPPA SPACE: an R package for normalization and quantitation of Reverse-Phase Protein Array data
- Consensus subtypes of hepatocellular carcinoma associated with clinical outcomes and genomic phenotypes
- Whole-genome characterization of lung adenocarcinomas lacking the RTK/RAS/RAF pathway
- Author Correction: Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples
- Large-Scale Characterization of Drug Responses of Clinically Relevant Proteins in Cancer Cell Lines
- Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples
- Sex differences in oncogenic mutational processes
- Personalized Network Modeling of the Pan-Cancer Patient and Cell Line Interactome
- Interactive Clustered Heat Map Builder: An easy web-based tool for creating sophisticated clustered heat maps
- Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes
- SAMMI: a semi-automated tool for the visualization of metabolic networks
- Generation of Raw RPPA Data and Their Conversion to Analysis-Ready Data
- Analytical Platforms 3: Processing Samples via the RPPA Pipeline to Generate Large-Scale Data for Clinical Studies
- Integrated Analysis of TP53 Gene and Pathway Alterations in The Cancer Genome Atlas
Education & Training
PhD, University of Texas at San Antonio, 2009