Andrea Sboner, Ph.D., is the Director of Informatics and Computational Biology and an Associate Professor of Computational Genomics in Computational Biomedicine. Dr. Sboner has an extensive expertise in next-generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis and has developed tools to analyze RNA sequencing to identify gene fusions (FusionSeq, Genome Res 2010) that led to the discovery of novel fusion transcripts in prostate cancer (Genme Biology, 2010), epithelioid hemangioendothelioma (Science Translational Medicine 2011, Genes, Chromosome Cancer, 2012, 2013), and rhabdomyosarcoma (Genes, Chromosome Cancer 2013). Dr. Sboner is an integral part of the EIPM’s core team which demonstrated the feasibility of developing organoids to study prostate cancer and is part of international genomics and cancer genomics initiatives (ENCODE, The Cancer Genome Atlas – TCGA, The International Cancer Genome Consortium – ICGC).
Dr. Sboner’s main interest is the computational analysis of the human cancer transcriptome and proteome for the development of predictive models and applications of tools for the analysis of next-generation sequencing data. With the use of next-generation sequencing, statistics, data analysis, data mining, machine learning he strives to tackle diseases that have thus far eluded effective treatments like cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and rare genetic conditions. This process is very data-intensive involving integrating terabytes of information generated from genomic sequencing, heart rate, past clinical information, etc. His focus is in particular on next-generation sequencing applied to the transcriptome (RNASeq) and to the genome to elucidate the complex mechanisms leading to cancer development and progression.