By Christina Crowe 

Cancer research on the road may not have been part of your holiday travel plans, but thanks to the innovation of Pathology Department faculty Sooryanarayana Varambally, Ph.D., MBA, Professor, Molecular & Cellular Pathology and Darshan Shimoga Chandrashekar, Ph. D., Assistant Professor, Genomic Diagnostics and Bioinformatics, it can be. Varambally and his team have created a mobile cancer transcriptome analysis (TCGA) app, “UALCAN Mobile,” based on their comprehensive cancer proteogenomic platform, UALCAN, for phones and tablets. The free research and educational app is available at the Google Play store and the Apple App Store. 

“The UALCAN Mobile app aims at providing large cancer datasets at the users’ fingertips,” says Varambally. “UALCAN Mobile will assist in finding causative gene expression changes and identifying biomarkers and therapeutic targets at any time, as the data will be mobile and portable.” This effort involved close collaboration with UAB Department of Computer Science Faculty Sidarth Kumar, Ph.D. (currently, University of Illinois Chicago) and student David Rubey, M.S.

Varambally and his team developed UALCAN (https://ualcan.path.uab.edu), a comprehensive platform that allows users to integrate the disparate data to better understand the gene, proteins, and pathways perturbed in cancer. This successful website has been visited over 1.3 million times, and articles related to UALCAN have been cited more than 5,000 times in since its inception 7 years ago. Recently, the team focused on developing a UALCAN mobile app that will provide cancer transcriptomic data, initially obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project, to evaluate protein-coding gene expression based on various stratification including stage, grade, race, gender and molecular-subtypes across different types of cancers.

Darshan Chandrashekar, Ph.D.

UALCAN’s mobile app effort has been supported by the UAB Department of Pathology and the Heersink School of Medicine. The team includes: Darshan Chandrashekar, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Genomic Diagnostics & Bioinformatics; Israel Ponce-Rodriguez, Information Systems Manager, UAB Pathology; Upender Manne, Ph.D., Professor, Anatomic Pathology, Chad Creighton, Ph.D., Professor, Baylor College of Medicine; Sidarth Kumar, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Chicago; Santhosh Kumar Karthikeyan, UAB Cancer Biology graduate student, David Rubey and Gopi Chand Puli, UAB Computer Science students.