Houlahan Lab Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences & Centre for Discovery in Cancer Research, McMaster University

Projects

The Houlahan lab integrates large-scale, diverse tumour multi-omic data with statistical and machine learning models to uncover the impact of inherited DNA variants on tumour evolution.

Germline-mediated immunoediting
Germline-mediated immunoediting

Inherited variants modulate various elements of the tumour-immune interface. We leverage large-scale, retrospective multi-omic cohorts to investigate the mechanisms by which inherited variants influence immune responses and sculpt the evolution of a tumour.

Pangenome DNA alignment
Pangenome DNA alignment

Genomic analyses heavily rely on accurate alignment of sequencing reads to reference genomes. We interrogate the impact genetic variation has on DNA alignment and downstream analyses to establish accurate and unbiased genomic best practices.