Ekta Khurana, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Physiology and Biophysics

  • Associate Professor of Computational Genomics in Computational Biomedicine in the Institute for Computational Biomedicine
  • Co-leader of the Genetics and Epigenetics Program, Meyer Cancer Center
  • Associate Director, Tri-Institutional PhD Program in Computational Biology and Medicine

646-962-6374

1305 York Avenue, Room Y-13.06
New York, NY 10021

Lab website: http://khuranalab.med.cornell.edu/

Techniques

Research Areas

Member of:

Research Summary:

The research interests of the lab fall under the broad categories of genomics, computational biology and systems biology. We participate in multiple international genomics consortia and collaborate with scientists at Weill Cornell to develop novel approaches to understand the role of sequence variants in human disease. The decreasing costs of genome sequencing are leading to a growing repertoire of personal genomes. However, we are lagging behind in understanding the functional consequences of the millions of variants obtained from sequencing. This is also the case for somatic variants in cancer. An average cancer genome contains thousands of somatic variants – but the functional implications of these variants on cancer progression and growth are not clear. We develop integrative computational models to understand the relationship between genomic sequence variation and disease. The impact of sequence variants in non-protein-coding regions of the genome is especially less-well-understood. We have developed muliple computational approaches (for example, FunSeq and RegNetDriver) that integrate large-scale data from multiple resources to identify the DNA point mutations and rearrangements in protein-coding genes and non-coding regulatory regions leading to human disease, in particular cancer.

Recent Publications:

  1. Yakneen, S, Waszak, SM, PCAWG Technical Working Group, Gertz, M, Korbel, JO, PCAWG Consortium et al.. Author Correction: Butler enables rapid cloud-based analysis of thousands of human genomes. Nat Biotechnol. 2023; :. doi: 10.1038/s41587-022-01554-1. PubMed PMID:36944844 .
  2. Rodriguez-Martin, B, Alvarez, EG, Baez-Ortega, A, Zamora, J, Supek, F, Demeulemeester, J et al.. Author Correction: Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes identifies driver rearrangements promoted by LINE-1 retrotransposition. Nat Genet. 2023; :. doi: 10.1038/s41588-023-01319-9. PubMed PMID:36944736 .
  3. Akdemir, KC, Le, VT, Chandran, S, Li, Y, Verhaak, RG, Beroukhim, R et al.. Author Correction: Disruption of chromatin folding domains by somatic genomic rearrangements in human cancer. Nat Genet. 2023; :. doi: 10.1038/s41588-023-01318-w. PubMed PMID:36944735 .
  4. Zapatka, M, Borozan, I, Brewer, DS, Iskar, M, Grundhoff, A, Alawi, M et al.. Author Correction: The landscape of viral associations in human cancers. Nat Genet. 2023; :. doi: 10.1038/s41588-023-01316-y. PubMed PMID:36944734 .
  5. Cortés-Ciriano, I, Lee, JJ, Xi, R, Jain, D, Jung, YL, Yang, L et al.. Author Correction: Comprehensive analysis of chromothripsis in 2,658 human cancers using whole-genome sequencing. Nat Genet. 2023; :. doi: 10.1038/s41588-023-01315-z. PubMed PMID:36944733 .
  6. Yuan, Y, Ju, YS, Kim, Y, Li, J, Wang, Y, Yoon, CJ et al.. Author Correction: Comprehensive molecular characterization of mitochondrial genomes in human cancers. Nat Genet. 2023; :. doi: 10.1038/s41588-023-01317-x. PubMed PMID:36944732 .
  7. Alexandrov, LB, Kim, J, Haradhvala, NJ, Huang, MN, Tian Ng, AW, Wu, Y et al.. Author Correction: The repertoire of mutational signatures in human cancer. Nature. 2023;614 (7948):E41. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-05600-5. PubMed PMID:36697836 PubMed Central PMC9931578.
  8. Li, Y, Roberts, ND, Wala, JA, Shapira, O, Schumacher, SE, Kumar, K et al.. Author Correction: Patterns of somatic structural variation in human cancer genomes. Nature. 2023;614 (7948):E38. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-05597-x. PubMed PMID:36697835 PubMed Central PMC9931568.
  9. ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium. Author Correction: Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes. Nature. 2023;614 (7948):E39. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-05598-w. PubMed PMID:36697834 PubMed Central PMC9931570.
  10. Gerstung, M, Jolly, C, Leshchiner, I, Dentro, SC, Gonzalez, S, Rosebrock, D et al.. Author Correction: The evolutionary history of 2,658 cancers. Nature. 2023;614 (7948):E42. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-05601-4. PubMed PMID:36697833 PubMed Central PMC9931577.
  11. Rheinbay, E, Nielsen, MM, Abascal, F, Wala, JA, Shapira, O, Tiao, G et al.. Author Correction: Analyses of non-coding somatic drivers in 2,658 cancer whole genomes. Nature. 2023;614 (7948):E40. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-05599-9. PubMed PMID:36697832 PubMed Central PMC9931557.
  12. PCAWG Transcriptome Core Group, Calabrese, C, Davidson, NR, Demircioğlu, D, Fonseca, NA, He, Y et al.. Author Correction: Genomic basis for RNA alterations in cancer. Nature. 2023;614 (7948):E37. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-05596-y. PubMed PMID:36697831 PubMed Central PMC9931574.
  13. Carlevaro-Fita, J, Lanzós, A, Feuerbach, L, Hong, C, Mas-Ponte, D, Pedersen, JS et al.. Author Correction: Cancer LncRNA Census reveals evidence for deep functional conservation of long noncoding RNAs in tumorigenesis. Commun Biol. 2022;5 (1):1347. doi: 10.1038/s42003-022-03769-z. PubMed PMID:36482178 PubMed Central PMC9732278.
  14. Rubanova, Y, Shi, R, Harrigan, CF, Li, R, Wintersinger, J, Sahin, N et al.. Author Correction: Reconstructing evolutionary trajectories of mutation signature activities in cancer using TrackSig. Nat Commun. 2022;13 (1):7567. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32336-7. PubMed PMID:36482170 PubMed Central PMC9731941.
  15. Sieverling, L, Hong, C, Koser, SD, Ginsbach, P, Kleinheinz, K, Hutter, B et al.. Author Correction: Genomic footprints of activated telomere maintenance mechanisms in cancer. Nat Commun. 2022;13 (1):7574. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32328-7. PubMed PMID:36481818 PubMed Central PMC9731961.
  16. Shuai, S, PCAWG Drivers and Functional Interpretation Working Group, Gallinger, S, Stein, LD, PCAWG Consortium. Author Correction: Combined burden and functional impact tests for cancer driver discovery using DriverPower. Nat Commun. 2022;13 (1):7571. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32343-8. PubMed PMID:36481739 PubMed Central PMC9732291.
  17. Cmero, M, Yuan, K, Ong, CS, Schröder, J, PCAWG Evolution and Heterogeneity Working Group, Corcoran, NM et al.. Author Correction: Inferring structural variant cancer cell fraction. Nat Commun. 2022;13 (1):7568. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32338-5. PubMed PMID:36481724 PubMed Central PMC9732297.
  18. Jiao, W, Atwal, G, Polak, P, Karlic, R, Cuppen, E, PCAWG Tumor Subtypes and Clinical Translation Working Group et al.. Author Correction: A deep learning system accurately classifies primary and metastatic cancers using passenger mutation patterns. Nat Commun. 2022;13 (1):7573. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32329-6. PubMed PMID:36481665 PubMed Central PMC9732335.
  19. Paczkowska, M, Barenboim, J, Sintupisut, N, Fox, NS, Zhu, H, Abd-Rabbo, D et al.. Author Correction: Integrative pathway enrichment analysis of multivariate omics data. Nat Commun. 2022;13 (1):7570. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32342-9. PubMed PMID:36481658 PubMed Central PMC9731958.
  20. Zhang, Y, Chen, F, Fonseca, NA, He, Y, Fujita, M, Nakagawa, H et al.. Author Correction: High-coverage whole-genome analysis of 1220 cancers reveals hundreds of genes deregulated by rearrangement-mediated cis-regulatory alterations. Nat Commun. 2022;13 (1):7572. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32333-w. PubMed PMID:36481652 PubMed Central PMC9732340.
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