Andrew McPherson

Background:

I am currently a graduate student in the CIHR Bioinformatics Training Program at Simon Fraser University.  I am joint supervised by Dr. David Huntsman of the Centre for Translational and Applied Genomics (CTAG) and Dr. Cenk Sahinalp of the SFU Lab For Computational Biology.  I received a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering from Simon Fraser University.  After my undergraduate degree I spent 5 years working in the video game industry.  My recent return to academia represents a long standing interest in research.

Research interests:

Computational methods for gene fusion discovery

Gene fusions are genomic mutational events that involve the concatenation of two genes by translocation, deletion or inversion of genomic DNA. The discovery of the BCR-ABL1 fusion in chronic myeloid leukemia and the TMPRSS2-ERG fusion in prostate cancer has shown these events to be relevant to cancer. Paired end whole transcriptome shotgun sequencing (RNASeq) provides the opportunity to interrogate the transcriptomes of cancer tissue, and the potential to discover novel gene fusions relevant to tumorigenesis.

My research is focused towards developing computational methods for gene fusion discovery.  I believe that it is possible to improve the accuracy of current computational methods by modeling the complexity of the transcriptome and exploiting known properties of the data.  Using the method I am developing, I hope to provide more accurate predictions for verification by biologists.  I also aim to develop a system that is sensitive and specific enough to detect the varied and sometimes unexpected transcriptomic variation possible in cancer.

Contact:
Name: Andrew McPherson
E-mail: amcphers [at] bccrc [dot] ca
Telephone: 1-604-877-6000 x2140
Centre for Translational and Applied Genomics
BC Cancer Agency
Vancouver, BC, Canada