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

"I joined Genentech in 1999, 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 providing infrastructure and analysis tools for various types of microarrays, including expression, genotyping, and genomic copy number data. We have developed systems that analyze microarray data in a uniform and comprehensive way; that identify relationships among genes and pathways; and that enable researchers to visualize and comprehend large-scale data readily across our entire range of internal and external data sets.

I have also been working on several genomics tools, including GMAP, a program that can rapidly and accurately map and align sequence fragments to entire genomes. GMAP provides the basis for our genomics infrastructure at Genentech, and it is also being used increasingly by other researchers since we released it to the public. We are planning to use tools derived from GMAP to study various genomic phenomena and relationships among genomes."

Collaborations "Our group works closely with the core microarray facility. In addition, we provide bioinformatics support for several departments at Genentech, including Pathology, Tumor Biology and Angiogenesis, Translational Oncology, and Microbial Pathology. 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 department, since we often have similar interests."

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