2023 UW Medical Data Science Symposium

Atul Butte, MD, PhD, is the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor and inaugural Director of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute (bchsi.ucsf.edu) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Butte is also the Chief Data Scientist for the entire University of California Health System, the tenth largest by revenue in the United States, with 20 health professional schools, 6 medical schools, 6 academic health centers, 10 hospitals, and over 1000 care delivery sites.

Dr. Butte has been continually funded by NIH for 20 years, is an inventor on 24 patents, and has authored nearly 300 publications, with research repeatedly featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Wired Magazine. Dr. Butte was elected into the National Academy of Medicine in 2015, and in 2013, he was recognized by the Obama Administration as a White House Champion of Change in Open Science for promoting science through publicly available data. Dr. Butte is also a co-founder of three investor-backed data-driven companies: Personalis (IPO, 2019), providing medical genome sequencing services, Carmenta (acquired by Progenity, 2015), discovering diagnostics for pregnancy complications, and NuMedii, finding new uses for drugs through open molecular data. Dr. Butte trained in Computer Science at Brown University, worked as a software engineer at Apple and Microsoft, received his MD at Brown University, trained in Pediatrics and Pediatric Endocrinology at Children’s Hospital Boston, then received his PhD from Harvard Medical School and MIT.

Talk Title: Translating a Trillion Points of Data into Therapies, Diagnostics, and New Insights into Disease

Abstract: There is an urgent need to take what we have learned in our new “genome era” and use it to create a new system of precision medicine, delivering the best preventative or therapeutic intervention at the right time, for the right patients.  Dr. Butte’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco builds and applies tools that convert trillions of points of molecular, clinical, and epidemiological data — measured by researchers and clinicians over the past decade and now commonly termed “big data” — into diagnostics, therapeutics, and new insights into disease. Several of these methods or findings have been spun out into new biotechnology companies.  Dr. Butte, a computer scientist and pediatrician, will highlight his lab’s recent work, including the use of publicly-available molecular measurements to find new uses for drugs including new therapies for autoimmune diseases and cancer, discovering new druggable targets in disease, the evaluation of patients and populations presenting with whole genomes sequenced, integrating and reusing the clinical and genomic data that result from clinical trials, discovering new diagnostics include blood tests for complications during pregnancy, and how the next generation of biotech companies might even start in your garage.