Qualifications: BSc, University of British Columbia
Chelsea Mayoh is a bioinformatician supporting researchers at the Children’s Cancer Institute (CCI). Chelsea completed her education at the University of British Columbia, Canada, extensively studying molecular biology and computer science leading her into a bioinformatician role at the Genome Sciences Centre, BC Cancer Agency before taking up her position at KCA. Her main area of expertise is in Next Generation Sequencing techniques where all parts of ‘omics’ within our tumours and normal tissues are analysed. Chelsea says that as a bioinformatician she has to “wear different hats, as within the period of one day we switch from being a molecular biologist to a computer programmer to a biostatistician and back again”.
At CCI she works on several paediatric cancers such as Leukaemia, Neuroblastoma, DIPG, Melanoma, Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer, Medulloblastoma, Sarcoma’s, and Inflammatory Myofibroblastic Tumours to name a few. She also provides support to clinical researchers from the Kids Cancer Centre at Sydney Children’s Hospital. Her role includes aiding researchers with experimental design, data acquisition, data analysis, statistical analysis, data amalgamation, manuscript writing, grant preparation, and training of bioinformatics tools. Chelsea takes great pleasure in being part of the Zero Childhood Cancer program where tumour samples are taken from patients in real time and sent to the lab to be analysed before the data is amalgamated and analysed to provide the treating clinician with an individual treatment plan for the patient. This personalised medicine approach gives the patient a greater chance of survival as the treatment is tailored to their specific cancer profile.