The PML hosted around 30 Bachelor and Master students from IIB ,CECOS University on 17th January 2020. Technical Lead Dr. Habib Jan welcomed the students and gave an overview of the Lab’s purpose, goals and the importance of precision medicine in general. Dr Habib went on to introduce the entire team of PML and their research areas.

This was followed by very informative talks by research team members. RA Abdus Salam in his talk titled “Bacteria that turned against us” explained the microbiota of oral cancer and why it is important to study oral microbiota in order to work on oral cancer. The role of microbiome was briefly
explained and showed how microbiome leads to oral cancer.

RA Saad Zaheer’s talk titled “Juggling biology and computer science” spoke about the role of data science in Precision Medicine. He also enlightened the students about the inter-disciplinary nature of work at Precision Medicine Lab.

“Mining mysteries of genetics”  by RA Maryam Shah was on different risk factors of oral cancer. She shed light on wetware sciences and the importance of Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS), Whole exome sequencing (WES), Epigenetics and Proteomics data in the study of Oral cancer.

The final talk “Cinderella of genetics” by RA Khudeja Salim was about the role and contribution of Drosophila to Genetics study and how it can be used as an avatar for research.

After the conclusion of these insightful yet entertaining talks, the students were taken to the lab facility for a visit to see the state of the art equipment and instruments present  in the Central Research and the Cell Culture Labs first hand. The students were very excited to closely look at instruments that they dream and aspire to get their hands on.

The visit was completed with a talk by PI, Dr. Faisal Khan, who explained the history and vision of PML and spoke about how the Lab has an unfair advantage of being located at RMI, at the heart of the Phase-V biomedical cluster in Hayatabad, Peshawar – which is arguably the densest healthcare cluster in the country, attracting patients from all over the country and the broader region. He also let the students know how they can get involved with the Lab

The event ended with a group photograph.