Keynote Address: The UCSC Cancer Genomics Hub

Cancer is a complex condition—patients present with thousands of subtypes involving different combinations of DNA mutations. Understanding cancer will require aggregating DNA data from many thousands of cancer genomes, facilitating the statistical power to distinguish patterns in the mutations. The rapidly plummeting cost of DNA sequencing will soon make cancer genome sequencing a widespread clinical practice. To anticipate this, UCSC has built a 5-petabyte database for tumor genomes that will be sequenced through National Cancer Institute projects—the Cancer Genomics Hub—and is tackling the significant computational challenges posed by storing, serving, and interpreting cancer genomics data.

David Haussler is an Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Distinguished Professor of Biomolecular Engineering and Director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Scientific Co-Director, California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3); and Cofounder of the Genome 10K Project. His research integrates mathematics, computer science, and molecular biology. He develops new computer-based algorithms to interpret comparative and high-throughput genomics data to understand gene structure, function, and regulation. As a collaborator on the international Human Genome Project, his team assembled the first human genome sequence and produced the UCSC Genome Browser, which is used extensively in biomedical research and serves as the platform for many large-scale genomics projects. Haussler received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder and belongs to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.