THOMAS LAFRAMBOISE

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences

Professor

About

Tom LaFramboise earned his B.S. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, both degrees being in theoretical mathematics. Subsequently, he spent several years as Assistant and Associate Professor in the mathematics department at Marietta College in Marietta, OH. In 2002, Tom decided to retrain in biostatistics, earning a Master's degree at the Harvard School of Public Health, which led to a postdoctoral position in cancer genomics in the laboratory of Matthew Meyerson at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT. He joined the department in August 2006.

Research Disciplines

Bioinformatics

Featured Presentation

See the full schedule here.

Title: High-throughput sequence analysis reveal microbial DNA and RNA as biomarkers in leukemia

Keywords: Human microbiome, leukemia, machine learning, DNA/RNA sequence analysis, biomarkers

Abstract: Investigation of the human microbiome in disease is an extremely active area of research. However, myeloid malignancies such as leukemia are not well-studied in this regard. Here we present our efforts to characterize microbial content at the disease site of myeloid malignancy patients – blood and bone marrow – and assess its clinical significance by examining its relationships with patient characteristics. To this end, large data sets of DNA and RNA sequence are mined for specific bacteria and viruses. Statistical and machine learning approaches are used to build classifiers that distinguish among disease subtypes and between cases and healthy controls.