Clinical Informatics and Genomics Lab

Welcome!

The Clinical Informatics and Genomics Laboratory (CIG-Lab) is a multidisciplinary laboratory within the Burn and Shock Trauma Institute (BSTI) and the Department of Surgery, at Loyola University Medical Center, whose mission is “to improve health in burn patients through scientific innovations”. Our aim is to model host response to burn injury. Our key focus is to understand the triangular relationship between Infections, Nutrition, and Multiple organ failure, which together account for more than 80% of mortality in critically injured burn patients. We believe that recent advances in genome technologies and computational breakthroughs provide an unprecedented opportunity for the development of novel therapeutic strategies for improvement of health in burn patients. The application of functional genomics and computational systems biology, and  integration of this information with clinical information  using bioinformatics and clinical informatics  along with molecular approaches are central components of our investigative strategy.  

CIG develops and applies quantitative methods in genomics and informatics. We are particularly focused on functional genomics problems involving high dimensional data sets, such as those obtained from large-scale gene expression, protein, and metabolic profiling and genotyping. Because of our research is translational, we also mine clinical data and develop methods for analysis and integration of clinical data with genomics data. The over-arching goal of our research is to utilize multiple sources of high-throughput genomic data to understand biological regulatory networks, the molecular basis of host-response to injury and host-pathogen interactions. This involves identification of biomarkers and characterizing the “wiring diagrams” of the molecular biology of the cells involved in host-response to injury. The ultimate goal is to build a quantitative system for understanding how genomic, epigenomic, and physiological factors interact with the environment to determine the molecular behaviors of the cells as manifested in variables such as RNA, protein and metabolic expression, and to develop more effective therapeutic strategies.

Research in CIG is currently supported by the Department of Defense (DOD) and the FALK Foundation.

We invite you to browse our site to learn more about the following:

The Clinical Research Program and The Functional Genomics Research Program