Appointments:
Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmacology, Dalhousie University; Adjunct Professor, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Manitoba.
Affiliations:
Beatrice Hunter Cancer Research Institute; Trace Analysis Research Center
Research Interests:
Bioinformatics; Genomics; Transcriptomics; Proteomics; Pediatric Cancer; Wilms Tumor; Metabolomics; single cell RNAseq
Solving our biggest health challenges by studying the smallest units of life
New advanced technologies now allow scientists to understand the role individual cells play in health and disease. My research employs these tools to isolate and characterize the genomic make up of single cells from major organs to learn, for example, how they influence the development and progression of diseases such as Wilms Tumor (WT), the most common childhood cancer of the kidney. Childhood cancers such as WT are particularly devastating when they recur, and my goal is to identify genes or individual cells that are most prominent in those hard-to-treat WTs. These genes/cells can help us to better stratify WT risk and develop targeted therapies for patients who carry mutations in these specific genes with personalized treatments. This will not only significantly mitigate the side effects of drugs, but it will reduce health care costs among children with cancer.
Hometown: A village in Kenya
What brought you to your current institution? I first came to Dalhousie University to pursue a master’s degree in Analytical Chemistry and specialized in Chemometrics, a subdiscipline of analytical chemistry that focuses on analyzing big data. Towards the end of my MSc., cancer biology, was becoming increasingly reliant on big data. These data were, however, more challenging than those witnessed in Chemistry and, always relishing a challenge, I moved in this direction and pursued a Ph.D. in bioinformatics for functional genomics, also right here at Dalhousie.
After several years as a post-doctoral fellow and a few others in government research positions, I moved to the venerated Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB), Leuven, Belgium and immersed myself properly into bioinformatics for cancer biology. I took a role as a Bioinformatics Staff Scientist at the laboratory for Angiogenesis and Vascular metabolism during which time I expanded my repertoire of bioinformatics skills to single-cell transcriptomics (scRNAseq), genomics (DNAseq, aCGH, WGS, WES), and epigenomics (ChIPseq, DNA methylation) data analysis and, added invaluable biological knowledge to my computational expertise. I then moved to the Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba (CHRIM) to start a bioinformatics Core Laboratory and was happy minding my business when a position became available at my alma matter, Dalhousie University, and I have been back here since 2021.
Learn More about my research www.karakachlab.org
Involvement with BHCRI to date:
Facilitator for the 2022 BHCRI/TFRI Cancer Research Conference Trainee Session, supervisor of CRTP trainees