*** Please note that this seminar has been postponed until a later date. ***

Dr. Paul Spellman is a Professor in the Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics and also the Program Co-Leader of Quantitative Oncology Program in the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health and Science University. He trained with Drs. David Botstein and Patrick O. Brown at Stanford University Medical School and later did a postdoc at UC Berkeley with Gerald M. Rubin. He then joined Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as a Scientist and later Staff Scientist. In 2011, he served for six months as the Special Assistant to the Deputy Director of the NCI, Dr. Doug Lowy, and then joined OHSU.

Dr. Spellman's group participates in numerous collaborations to understand the effects of genome aberrations in cancer. These efforts include development of new methodologies for identifying changes in the cancer genome, systematic integration of multiple genomic data types (copy number, expression, and mutation) to better understand the process by which cancer develops, and the application of cell line systems as models for the genetic heterogeneity within cancers. Two major recent thrusts are the systematic characterization of cancer genomes as part of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA Network, Nature, 2011) and the development and application of methods to reconstruct tumor evolution (Durinck et al. Cancer Discovery, 2011). This group of researchers aims to push these analyses forward in continued analysis of ovarian cancer genomes as well as kidney and breast cancer genomes. Dr. Spellman has taken the lead in utilizing cell-free DNA to monitor cancer at OHSU and is developing methods to detect recurrences early and to sequence cancer genomes from blood.

For more information, visit the Spellman Lab's website.