Dr Keith Baggerly, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center
Keith Baggerly

Biography

 

Keith Baggerly is a Professor of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he has worked since 2000. He has worked extensively with data from a wide variety of high-throughput assays. Dr. Baggerly is best known for his work on “forensic bioinformatics”, in which reexamination of raw data shows the need for careful experimental design, preprocessing, and documentation – the careful application of basic statistics and sanity checks. His work has been featured in Science, Nature, the front page of the New York Times, and 60 Minutes, and prompted an IOM review of the evidence that should be required before omics-based assays are used to guide therapy. He has been profiled in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Today, like the rest of us, he is struggling with the issues associated with distilling useful information from the wide variety of public data sources.

Abstract

Genomics and Ovarian Cancer

Ovarian cancer is a particularly lethal disease, driven both by physical boundaries (it’s hard to detect) and unfavorable genomics (early TP53 mutation leads to bad scrambling at the outset). In this talk, we describe how we’re trying to improve response by focusing on more consistently measurable endpoints, and how this has resulted in iterative development of both surgical management and omics-based measurement.