Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

Identifying Actionable and Druggable Mutations from Cancer Big Data

Zhongming Zhao, Center for Precision Health, School of Biomedical Informatics and School of Public Health, UT Health Science Center, Houston, TX

Abstract

As we have entered the precision medicine and big data science era, there are many unmet challenges on identifying the disease related information from large, heterogeneous data, and translating the findings for clinical use. Among these challenges, one is how to effectively identify driver mutations and genes in cancer genomes, especially those with the potential for druggable targets for the development of molecularly targeted cancer therapies. In this talk, I will introduce several informatics approaches, including SGDriver, AlloDriver, and KNMPx, to identifying cancer mutations and genes from large amount of somatic mutation data and our recently developed integrative network-based framework for identifying new druggable targets and anticancer indications from existing drugs. Bio Dr. Zhongming Zhao holds Chair Professor for Precision Health and is the founding director of the Center for Precision Health, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). Before he joined UTHealth in 2016, he was Ingram Endowed Professor of Cancer Research, Professor (with tenure) in the Departments of Biomedical Informatics, Psychiatry, and Cancer Biology of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Chief Bioinformatics Officer of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC), Director of the VICC Bioinformatics Resource Center, and the Associate Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Quantitative Sciences. Dr. Zhao has unique, interdisciplinary training: he received his master’s degrees in Genetics (1996), Biomathematics (1998), Computer Science (2002), Ph.D. degree in Human and Molecular Genetics (2000), and Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioinformatics (2001-2003). Dr. Zhao has broad interest in bioinformatics, genomics, precision medicine, and systems biology and has co-authored >330 papers in these areas. Dr. Zhao is the founding president of The International Association for Intelligent Biology and Medicine (IAIBM, 2018-).