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Research summary

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is an inflammatory lung disease that makes it difficult to breathe. It includes conditions such as chronic bronchitis and emphysema. As Canada Research Chair in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Dr. Xuekui Zhang is working on a new immunotherapy for COPD by developing and applying statistical methods and software to analyze complex and big data.

He and his research team are devising statistical methods and software to discover and validate cell-type abundance biomarkers using single-cell genomic data. They are also developing new methods to improve genomic data analysis, clinical trial design and multi-task predictions. Ultimately, Zhang and his team will use this analysis pipeline to create the first immunotherapy to cure COPD. Their methods will also be useful in a range of other fields, such as COVID-19 research, agriculture and engineering.