On Monday, January 30th, the College of Pharmacy hosted a faculty research seminar presented by Dr. Mohammad Askandar Iqbal, Assistant professor, Thumbay Research Institute for Precision Medicine (TRIPM). Dr. Iqbal holds a PhD in biochemistry from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. He also received postdoctoral training at MD Anderson Cancer Center in the United States. The seminar was titled: “Understanding the Metabolic Landscape of Breast Cancer”
The seminar was attended by faculty members and master students of drug discovery and development.
Dr. Iqbal presented on the findings of one of his research group’s groundbreaking studies. The study analyzed multi-dimensional data of over 3000 cases of breast cancer and investigated 90 different types of metabolic deviations and revealed the presence of three unique subtypes of breast cancer, each with its own metabolic signature.
Dr. Iqbal and his team employed computational tools to exhaustively characterize metabolic subtypes including machine-based learning to predict patient outcome and other clinicopathological indicators and suggested the effective treatment modalities for patients belonging to different subtypes. His findings may have useful implications in personalized medicine targeting breast cancer.
The seminar was followed by a lively and insightful discussion, as faculty members and students delved into the implications of the study and explored ways in which the findings could be applied to other types of cancer and in the field of clinical oncology.
