When:
November 4, 2015 @ 10:40 am – 11:40 am
2015-11-04T10:40:00-05:00
2015-11-04T11:40:00-05:00
Where:
University Club, Ballroom A
123 University Pl
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
USA

Daisuke Nakada Memorial Lecture, Biomedical Graduate Student Association

Atul Butte, MD, PhD is the new Director of the new Institute of Computational Health Sciences (ICHS) at the University of California, San Francisco, and a Professor of Pediatrics.  Dr. Butte trained in Computer Science at Brown University, worked as a software engineer at Apple and Microsoft, received his MD at Brown University, trained in Pediatrics and Pediatric Endocrinology at Children’s Hospital Boston, then received his PhD from Harvard Medical School and MIT.   Dr. Butte has authored nearly 200 publications, with research repeatedly featured in Wired Magazine, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.  In 2013, Dr. Butte was recognized by the White House as an Open Science Champion of Change for promoting science through publicly available data.  Dr. Butte is also a founder of three investor-backed data-driven companies: Personalis, providing clinical interpretation of whole genome sequences, Carmenta, discovering diagnostics for pregnancy complications, and NuMedii, finding new uses for drugs through open molecular data. Dr. Butte is also the principal investigator of ImmPort,  the clinical and molecular data repository for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

 

Abstract: There is an urgent need to translate genome-era discoveries into clinical utility, but the difficulties in making bench-to-bedside translations have been well described. The nascent field of translational bioinformatics may help. Dr. Butte’s lab at UCSF builds and applies tools that convert trillions points of molecular, clinical, and epidemiological data — measured by researchers and clinicians over the past decade and now commonly termed “big data” — into diagnostics, therapeutics, and new insights into disease. Dr. Butte, a bioinformatician and pediatric endocrinologist, will highlight how publicly-available molecular measurements to find new uses for drugs including drug repositioning for inflammatory bowel disease, discovering new treatable inflammatory mechanisms of disease in type 2 diabetes, and how the next generation of biotech companies might even start in your garage.