Paperwork, Not Algorithms the Biggest Challenge for Large Bioinformatics Projects, Says David Haussler, UCSC

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David Haussler and his team at UC Santa Cruz have gone from one large bioinformatics project to another. After creating the original Genome Browser (which still gets over 1 million hits per month), David worked to build a large data set for cancer genomics, The Cancer Genome Atlas.

Guest: David Haussler, Director, Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering, UCSC

Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce Man of the Year:Bioinformatics expert David Haussler


“With more data comes statistical power,” David says in today’s show. “The only way we can separate out the “driver” mutations from the “passenger” mutations is to have a large sample of different cancers."
  • This makes sense. One needs millions of samples to see when a mutation is just random, or when it occurs with true statistical frequency. So what have been the challenges to building such a large data set?
  • David says issues around consent and privacy have actually held up his projects more than any technical difficulties. For example, the NIH has had several meetings for over a year now to determine whether their data can be put on the commercial cloud. In addition there are issues connecting large medical institutions around the country and various countries from around the world. David is a co-founder of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, which he says is nearing the tipping point of being THE bioinformatics utility that will be globally adopted.
  • In the days of commercial offerings such as Amazon Cloud, is compute and storage still a problem? And what, after the privacy issues are seen to, are the technical challenges for bioinformaticians like Haussler?

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David Haussler and his team at UC Santa Cruz have gone from one large bioinformatics project to another. After creating the original Genome Browser (which still gets over 1 million hits per month), David worked to build a large data set for cancer genomics