Seminar: Novel Technologies for the Detection of Human Diseases

Abstract

Detection of disease, including cancer, at the earliest stage is of paramount importance for successful treatment. Even though liquid biopsies are an exciting and highly promising frontier for the detection of human disease, highly sensitive bioinformatic methods that enable early detection are still lacking. Nullomers are short DNA sequences that are absent from a genome. In this talk, I will discuss how we can utilize them to precisely diagnose cancer from cell-free DNA in liquid biopsy samples and how they can be used for the development of novel, sensitive, specific and straightforward cancer diagnostic tools. Finally, I will discuss how this technology can be used for precision oncology and to guide treatments and how similar technologies can be used for the detection of pathogens and other human diseases.

Bio

Ilias Georgakopoulos Soares is a bioinformatician, interested in using interdisciplinary approaches to study biological problems. His undergraduate training was in Biological Sciences at Imperial College London. His PhD work was in cancer genomics, machine learning and bioinformatics and during that period he developed novel machine learning methods to model mutability across cancer genomes. While a graduate student, he taught undergraduate courses including Programming, Statistics and Mathematical Biology. Since January 2019, he has been working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California San Francisco in the Ahituv laboratory. His postdoc work has been based on computational biology, primarily working on nullomers and leveraging them to develop novel methods to detect tumor DNA from liquid biopsies, a technology that he recently patented. At the same time, he has other research projects on gene regulation, the development of new computational tools and the analysis of massively parallel reporter assay experiments to predict predictive models. Furthermore, he has been working with experimentalists in multiple projects including developmental biology, gene regulation and cancer genomics and he is participating in the new release of the ENCODE consortium. Moving forward, his research interests are in the development of algorithms and methods to better detect human diseases including cancer.