A Bioinformatics Approach to Clinical Sequencing

Dr. Rhodes has a 12-year track record in cancer genomics and bioinformatics, with a significant focus on building systems to enable cutting-edge cancer research. He founded a successful cancer genomics and informatics company, Compendia Bioscience, recently acquired by Life Technologies. To build Compendia, he recruited and trained a talented team of 30 clinical scientists, bioinformaticists, cancer biologists, data curators and software engineers. As a graduate student, he led the development of Oncomine (Rhodes et al, PNAS, 2004; Rhodes et al, Nature Genetics, 2005), a cancer microarray database and data-mining application. Through the use of Oncomine, he contributed to several important discoveries, including the discovery of gene fusions in prostate cancer (Tomlins, Rhodes, et al., Science, 2005), SPINK1 in prostate cancer (Tomlins, Rhodes et al, Cancer Cell, 2008) and AGTR1 in breast cancer (Rhodes et al, PNAS, 2009). Compendia has since extensively expanded the Oncomine platform, and Oncomine is now widely recognized in academia and pharma as the leading cancer genomics data mining resource, with several hundred citations, and 15,000+ users. As Head of Medical Science Informatics at Life Technologies, he has turned his focus to next-generation sequencing data analysis, and leads several collaborations with pharmaceutical companies aimed at discovering novel oncogenic mutations and gene fusions from thousands of exomes and transcriptomes from The Cancer Genome Atlas. In his role as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the U. of Michigan, he contributes to cancer genome analyses of prostate cancers (Grasso et al, Nature, 2012) and participates in and advises the clinical sequencing initiative MI-ONCOSEQ.