Thomas D. Wu Senior Scientist: Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Profile | Education/Background | Top Scientific Papers | Awards & Honors

"I joined Genentech after finishing my training at Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. I came to Genentech because it provided an interdisciplinary and open environment where I could apply my background in medicine and computer science to solve challenging and important problems."

Current Projects "Our group is focused primarily on analyzing data from large-scale biological assays and developing new methods for their analysis. Our work in the past has emphasized microarrays, and we have developed a comprehensive infrastructure at Genentech for both laboratory management and scientific analysis of microarray data. Our systems enable researchers to visualize and comprehend large data sets across our entire range of internal and external data sets.

We are now shifting our focus to high-throughput sequencing. I previously developed a genomic alignment program called GMAP, which can rapidly and accurately map and align sequence fragments to entire genomes. This program is distributed publicly and is used widely in the bioinformatics community. To handle the special needs of recent sequencing technologies, I have recently written and released another program called GSNAP, which can detect complex variants and splicing in short reads. These and other associated tools enable us to identify new biological phenomena in genomic and transcriptional sequencing data."

Collaborations "Our group works closely with the core microarray and sequencing laboratories, and is involved in analyzing data from genome-wide association studies. In addition, we provide bioinformatics support for several departments at Genentech, including Tumor Biology and Angiogenesis, Cancer Signaling and Translational Oncology, and Microbial Pathogenesis. We work closely with researchers in those departments to analyze specific data sets and to develop algorithms for particular problems. We also collaborate with other scientists in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology department, since we often have similar interests."

Inspiration/Vision "I am inspired by the tremendous resources we have at Genentech, and by the unprecedented volumes of high-throughput data that are now available. Much of our motivation comes from the opportunity to use such data to discover biological phenomena and possible insights to develop new therapeutics."