Dr. Atul Butte is Chief of the Division of Systems Medicine and Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Genetics at Stanford University. 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 Pediatric Endocrinology at Children's Hospital Boston, then received his PhD from Harvard Medical School and MIT. Dr. Butte is also a founder of Personalis, providing clinical interpretation of whole genome sequences, and NuMedii, finding new uses for drugs. Dr. Butte has authored more than 160 publications on personalized and systems medicine, biomedical informatics, and molecular diabetes. Dr. Butte's research has been featured in the New York Times Science Times and the International Herald Tribune (2008), Wall Street Journal (2010 -2012), and San Jose Mercury News (2010).
There is an urgent need to translate genome-era discoveries into clinical utility, but the difficulties in making bench-to-bedside translations have been well described. The nascent field of translational bioinformatics may help. Dr. Butte’s lab at Stanford builds and applies tools that convert more than a trillion points of molecular, clinical, and epidemiological data -- measured by researchers and clinicians over the past decade and now commonly called “big data”-- into diagnostics, therapeutics, and new insights into disease. Several of these methods or findings are spun out into new biotechnology companies. Dr. Butte, a bioinformatician and pediatric endocrinologist, will highlight his lab’s work on using publicly-available molecular measurements to find new uses for drugs including drug repositioning for cancers, discovering new targetable receptors and prototype drugs developed from pubic data sets, and new work on integrating and reusing the clinical and genomic data that result from clinical trials. Dr. Butte will especially cover big data in biomedicine as a platform for innovation and entrepreneurship.