I am an Associate Professor in Molecular Medicine at the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science. I have experience in diverse disciplines, including Bioinformatics,Engineering, Molecular Biology, and Computational Biology.  I am also a full member of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center, as well as the Co-director of the Biomarker Discovery Laboratory, within the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine. My research program consists of bioinformatics specialists, molecular biologists, epidemiologists, and pathologists. This team has demonstrated success in discovery and translation of several biomarkers as well as developing evidence-based models that should help clinicians stratify (cancer) patients in order to provide each individual with the appropriate care. With the recent advances in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies, my laboratory has been engaging in massive sequencing to scan the genome of cancer cells for abnormalities that can be used for clinical purposes such as diagnosis and stratification of patients for optimal treatment. Our publications in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Cancer Research and Blood, further demonstrate our discoveries, validation, and translation capabilities. My program facilitated translation of many biomarkers discovered with genomics technologies.

Furthermore, the program developed MPseq to profile the whole genome of tumors tissues for chromosomal rearrangements even from minute samples by using LCM and in-situ amplification.  MPseq lead to innovative applications of junction detection for monitoring using cfDNA, resolution of lineage/Independence of different cancer foci, identification of neoantigens and viral integration sites.

MPseq has been translated to the Mayo clinical laboratories.  My program also facilitated the development of innovative ways to validate drugs (3D microcancer ex-vivo models), innovative genome visualization technologies and data Integration platforms that use push-button pipelines.