The goal of biomedical research is to uncover perturbations in important pathways that lead to disease states so that therapeutic treatments may be designed. It is clear that most diseases are caused by a set of alterations at one or more levels of the genetic program.

Only through simultaneous monitoring of DNA, RNA, and protein can the comprehensive understanding of underlying processes occurring in multi-factorial diseases may be made. While there is a great need to integrate data derived from functional genomic experiments (e.g. expression, mutation, CGH, and proteomics profiling) with that ascertained clinically from the evaluation and treatment of patients, there are no software, analytical, or visualization applications which can perform this task.

Thus, the primary, long term goals of the Nagarajan lab are to conduct clinical and biomedical informatics research, to develop software applications which will simultaneously co-analyze and co-visualize a wide variety of functional genomics datasets, gene annotation, and clinicopathological data, and to utilize these heuristic algorithms in order to identify potential diagnostic markers and putative therapeutic targets.

These software based multiparametric medical diagnostic tests will be used for molecular "fingerprinting" of tumors and polyfactorial diseases and will ultimately lead to rational drug design to combat such illnesses.