Dr. Huether received a PhD in Structural biology from the Biological Sciences program at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute (HWI)/ University at Buffalo. As a graduate student he developed a database that computationally combined a class of proteins by fingerprint amino acids and assisted in creating a high school scientific enrichment program at the HWI. After, he spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computational Biology and Department of Structural biology at St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tn. Here he played a role on the Pediatric Cancer Genome Project team that sequenced and annotated the tumors many of childhood cancers. While at St Jude, he began to work on the problem of variant classification by developing new computational tools for teasing apart the molecular impact of alterations in cancer.
In 2014, he moved to the clinical sequencing company Ambry Genetics in Aliso Viejo, Ca. Where he quickly built a small team of scientists studying the problem of variant classification. A hurdle in clinical sequencing is the presence of rare personalized variants. Exacerbated by the fact that little information exists in understanding their clinical significance, Dr. Huether, acting as lead structural biologist, led an effort to include diverse structural, computational and evolutionary techniques to gain insight into the clinical relevance of rare variants in hereditary diseases.
As of January of 2017, Dr. Huether joined Tempus Labs, in Chicago Il. as a Senior Computational Biologist. His current position is Director of Variant Science pursuing several key initiatives:
developing heuristic and machine learning tools to integrating the available rich genomic, structural and functional data to interpret, classify and prioritize the impact of variants;
building key knowledgebases for clinical reporting;
advancing biomarker discovery through large-scale sequencing projects.
Dr. Huether is a member of PTEN and TP53 expert panel working groups for the Clingen consortium. The goal of the consortium is to set gene specific criteria for analysis and classification of clinically relevant variants. He is contributing computational, functional and structural expertise. Additionally, he has been recognized for his work as one of Chicago's 40 under 40 Scientists in 2019.
The promise of personalized medicine requires both a detailed understanding of changes on the molecular level and a clear prognostic, diagnostic or therapeutic path for the patient. Targeted, Exome and WGS sequencing have made it possible to identify the alterations within a tumor but there still remains a void in partitioning and classifying the impact and actionability of the observed variants to personalize therapies to each patient.