Profile
My laboratory has developed expertise in genome-scale interpretation of cancer and healthy population datasets. Our research in cancer is centred around detailed characterization of all genomic, epigenomic events that impacts on transcriptional landscape of the tumor and normal tissue samples of an individual patient. We aim to identify driving molecular alterations in genes and pathways that are associated with various clinical phenotypes of the cancer. Currently our studies are focused : [1] to understand multi-omics landscape of Oral Cancer and other Oral Precancers progression, recurrence and metastasis, [2] to understand landscape of genomic alterations in TNBC and non-TNBC breast cancers, [3] understanding baseline DNA variation in contemporary normal human populations, and [4] development of flexible data-analytics pipelines for rapid processing of genomics bigdata. Our lab taken major roles in multiple mission mode projects including ICGC project, SyMeC project, VNCI-Oral, VNCI-Breast, INSACOG, GenomeIndia, National-supercomputing-mission-project and IBCGA project etc.
Current Focus Areas
(i) Identification of molecular signatures that captures progression states of oral pre-cancers and frank oral cancers
(ii) Identification of specific tumour features, clonal diversity that are associated with local lymph-node metastasis and tumor recurrence
(iii) Understand the nature of immune contexture in various stages of oral precancer and oral cancers through bulk, single-cell and spatial approaches.
(iv) Understanding molecular landscapes of Indian TNBC and non-TNBC breast cancers using multi-omics approaches
(v) Building up software tools, pipelines and databases for analysis of genomics big data, including healthy, cancer, rare-disease and infectious disease (SARS-cov-2).
(vi) Development of AI/ML based applications in niche areas of digital pathology and cancer genomics.
Selected Publications
1. Das S, Biswas NK*, Basu A*. Mapinsights: deep exploration of quality issues and error profiles in high-throughput sequence data. Nucleic Acids Research. 2023 Jun 28:gkad539. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkad539.
2. Ghosh A, Das C, Ghose S, Maitra A, Roy B, Majumder PP, Biswas NK*. Integrative analysis of genomic and transcriptomic data of normal, tumour and co-occurring leukoplakia tissue triads drawn from patients with gingivobuccal oral cancer identifies signatures of tumour initiation and progression. Journal of Pathology. 2022 Mar 31. doi: 10.1002/path.5900.
3. Pradhan, S., Das, S., Singh, A.K, Das C, Basu A, Majumder PP, Biswas NK*. dbGENVOC: database of GENomic Variants of Oral Cancer, with special reference to India. Database (2021) Vol. 2021: article ID baab034.
4. Biswas NK*, Das C, Das S, Maitra A, Nair S, Gupta T, D'Cruz AK, Sarin R, Majumder PP. Lymph node metastasis in oral cancer is strongly associated with chromosomal instability and DNA repair defects. Int J Cancer. 2019 Nov 1;145(9):2568-2579. doi: 10.1002/ijc.32305.