Translational Medical Discoveries Through Data Transparency and Reuse

With the end of the United States NIH budget doubling and completion of the Human Genome Project, there is a need to translate genome-era discoveries into clinical utility. The difficulties in making bench-to-bedside translations have been described: comprehensive molecular studies on patients are expensive, and hospitals are not phenotypers. The nascent field of translational bioinformatics may help.  Dr. Butte’s lab at Stanford builds and applies tools that convert more than 300 billion points of molecular, clinical, and epidemiological data -- measured by researchers and clinicians over the past decade -- into diagnostics, therapeutics, and new insights into disease.  Dr. Butte, a bioinformatician and pediatric endocrinologist, will highlight his lab’s work on using publicly-available molecular measurements to find new uses for drugs, environment-wide association studies, evolution and disease, and evaluations of patients presenting with personal genomes.