 PhD candidate Emilie Ramsahai envisions a day when a company in Trinidad and Tobago develops medicinal drugs to compete in the global pharmaceutical industry.
Undaunted by the influence and might of Big Pharma, she muses on the possibility of a thriving industry in “made in Trinidad & Tobago” branded pharmaceuticals existing alongside the industry behemoths dominating this trillion-dollar sector.
In April, Emilie’s current research in this area thrust her into the spotlight at the Faculty of Science & Technology’s Annual Research Symposium 2017. She took the Head of Department Award for Best Oral Presentation for the Department of Mathematics and Statistics for her study on “The use of gene interaction networks to improve the identification of cancer driver genes.”
As proud as the PhD in Statistics student is of that achievement, she has her eyes set on a bigger prize – one day being part of a super-team of Trinidad and Tobago-based medicinal drugs developers.
“A lot of our drugs are imported and then re-sold, but there’s no reason we cannot develop our own industry right here. It is very possible,” she pronounced, matter-of-factly.
Her insight comes from specializing in Bioinformatics: a cross-disciplinary field combining Statistics, Computer Science and Bio Chemistry. Emilie’s PhD in Statistics would complement her first degree in Mathematics and Masters in Computer Science, which combine well for a career in Bioinformatics.
With genome sequencing, Bioinformatics has become mainstream internationally and is now a budding field of study at The UWI. Due to its cross-disciplinary nature, collaboration with teams of specialists in different fields is unavoidable. This could lead organically to the creation of a research team involved in developing pharmaceutical drugs within the borders of Trinidad and Tobago.
While Big Pharma is motivated primarily by economic interests, Emilie’s passion for pharmaceuticals is rooted in a love of research, along with a desire to meaningfully affect lives.
These twin forces inspired the research on cancer drivers presented at the Symposium.
“The significance of this research is its potential to improve the quality of cancer treatment, drug development and personalized care. It can impact lives and health care in general for cancer patients.”
At present, cancer treatment revolves around chemotherapy and surgery – both traumatic experiences.
Explaining how Bioinformatics can improve cancer care and the quality of lives, Emilie said her research employed different strategies to distinguish cancer driver genes from passenger genes. Her team investigated the benefit of combining data from three different sources on the prediction outcome of cancer driver genes. This resulted in an enriched dataset, which increased its accuracy by 17% and 28%, respectively. The study identified 33 new candidate driver genes.
“Our study highlights the potential of combining networks and weighting edges to provide greater accuracy in the identification of cancer driver genes,” she said.
“An understanding of mutated genes that drive the formation of cancer is important in the discovery of new drugs and the recommendation of targeted treatment regimes for patients,” she said.
“This research is actually looking to improve the quality of life and type of treatments, possible drug targets and alternative ways of treating cancer. It is mainstream in terms of providing a different way to treat cancer.”
Emilie’s peer-reviewed research was published jointly with Kheston Walkins, PhD student in Molecular Genetics; primary supervisor, Dr. Vrijesh Tripathi of the Department of Mathematics; and co-supervisor Dr. Melford John, of the Department of Preclinical Sciences in PeerJ – an award-winning biological and medical sciences journal. She also acknowledged the support of Dr. Rajini Haraksingh from the Department of Life Sciences for allowing her work to be presented at the Symposium.
Amid rising incidents of lifestyle and other diseases in Trinidad and Tobago, her long-term goal is to head a research group focused on drug development for different diseases, based on genomics.
“At the moment we are using publicly available data but if we’re doing something with data specific to Trinidad and Tobago we would need to obtain funding… I am looking for a research group for drug development for not only cancer but other diseases. A lot of the current work can be done with other diseases.”
Emilie’s advice to those contemplating a career in this field is to embrace collaboration and be willing to acquire new knowledge. Many researchers are unwilling to step outside of their areas of expertise, deterred by the steep learning curve required and the difficulty of collaborating with others.
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