Biography
Haider is a PhD student Biomedical Engineering in the Pritchard Lab at Penn State University. His work focuses on quantifying drug resistance to targeted anticancer therapeutics at scale. Variants of uncertain drug resistance in cancer are an analogous problem to VUS, but face unique technical barriers in DMS screens. To overcome these barriers, Haider built a scalable duplex sequencing workflow that enables deep error-corrected sequencing of variant libraries. He then applied this workflow to study resistance to targeted therapies in the BCR-ABL fusion protein. This workflow is able to successfully detect and quantify known resistant variants, as well as rare variants of unknown drug resistance in BCR-ABL. In this way, DMS screens can identify drug resistance variants long before they are seen in the clinic. This prospective detection of drug resistant variants can help guide clinical treatment decision-making as well as prioritize
Employer
Pritchard Lab, Penn State University
Seminars