Welcome

Welcome to the Navin laboratory at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.  We are a cancer genomics and computational biology research lab located in the heart of the Texas Medical Center.

Our lab is interested in understanding how single cells evolve into a complex masses of tissues that ultimately kill patients.  As tumors evolve from a single cell, they diverge and form distinct lineages and subpopulations, resulting in intratumor heterogeneity.  This genetic diversity confounds the basic research and clinical diagnosis of human tumors. Our lab is developing new genomic methods, including single-cell sequencing technologies to resolve genetic heterogeneity in tumors, and understand how somatic mutations evolve.  We use these tools to trace lineage and identify the relative chronology of mutations that occur during tumorigenesis.  Our work is focused mainly on breast cancer, in which we investigate the role of clonal diversity in promoting invasion, metastasis and response to chemotherapy.  Our lab is also actively involved in developing new analytical methods and software tools to analyze cancer genome and single cell data that is generated by next-generation sequencing.