Start
Feb 01, 2018 - 17:00
End
Feb 01, 2018 - 18:00
Venue
Rm. No. 118 Ground floor Chemical Engg. Dept.
Event Type
Speaker
Dr. Nikesh Kotecha Vice President Informatics at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy
Title
New Frontiers in Immuno-Cancer Therapy
Abstract:Recent advances in oncology are transforming the nature of healthcare and biotech with immunotherapy leading the charge. These advances underscore a central need for computational approaches to manage knowledge and information. This includes the need to work with high throughput technologies generating gigabytes of data routinely integration across multiple modalities of data and providing contextually relevant information from public and other data sources to get the most out of the data collected. As a result increasing use of simulation network analysis and big data driven research are becoming a key part of oncology initiatives. I will discuss the informatics opportunities and challenges in this space and highlight use cases from ongoing work at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.Bio: Nikesh Kotecha PhD currently serves as vice president of informatics at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. His background and training include a PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford University a BS in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University and over 15 years of experience building analytic applications to address scientific and informatics problems in healthcare. Prior to joining Parker Institute Dr. Kotecha was the co-founder of Cytobank Inc. an analytics company building solutions around single-cell proteomics and cytometry two technologies that are revolutionizing how we understand disease mechanisms and have broad implications for treatments in cancer and autoimmunity. Inspiration for this project grew out of his work in Dr. Garry Nolan’s lab at Stanford University developing a diagnostic for juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia and on analysis methods for single-cell assays. Dr. Kotecha’s past experience also includes work at TIBCO Spotfire Inc. and Pfizer Inc. in multiple roles including engineering technical sales and business development. Dr. Kotecha is also a consulting faculty member in the Computational and Systems Immunology program at Stanford University where he helps train the next generation of scientists on methods approaches and analyses in an era of high throughput measurements and big data.