Translating a trillion points of data into therapies, diagnostics, and new insights into disease

There is an urgent need to translate genome-era discoveries into clinical utility, but the difficulties in making bench-to-bedside translations have been well described. The nascent field of translational bioinformatics may help. Dr. Butte's lab at Stanford builds and applies tools that convert more than a trillion 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 including drug repositioning for inflammatory bowel disease, discovering new treatable inflammatory mechanisms of disease in type 2 diabetes, and the evaluation of patients presenting with whole genomes sequenced.