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Research

Dr. Griffith is Associate Professor of Medicine and Assistant Director of the McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine. He has more than 14 years of experience in the fields of genomics, bioinformatics, data mining, and cancer research. The Griffith lab’s research is focused on improving our understanding of cancer biology and the development of personalized medicine strategies for cancer using genomics and informatics technologies. This is accomplished by developing bioinformatics methods for the analysis of high throughput sequence data and identification of biomarkers for diagnostic, prognostic and drug response prediction. Dr. Griffith is also leading the analysis of several large-scale genomics projects to help discover genomic signatures relevant to cancer initiation, progression and treatment response. Dr. Griffith also leads several bioinformatics workshops as an instructor for the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory high-throughput sequencing workshop series. To date, Dr. Griffith has received over 20 competitive research awards and honors. He was named an ‘up and coming’ investigator in Genome Technology Magazine and listed in Wired Magazine’s second annual ‘smart list’ as an emerging talent. He was awarded an NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award to develop integrated analysis and interpretation methods for whole genome, exome and transcriptome sequence data in cancer. He is currently focused on applying these methods to better understand the regulatory consequence of somatic mutations that are otherwise of unknown functional significance and to improve the design of personalized cancer vaccines. To date, Dr. Griffith has 119 publications with major areas of focus in precision medicine, immunogenomics, cancer genomics, biomarker discovery, sequence analysis, and alternative splicing. His lab has made substantial contributions to open source and open access resources for cancer research and personalized medicine including the creation of platforms for alternative expression analysis (www.alexaplatform.org), regulatory region annotation (www.oreganno.org), splice regulatory mutation discovery (www.regtools.org), mining drug-gene interactions (www.dgidb.org), curation of functional cancer mutations (www.docm.info), and the clinical interpretation of variants in cancer (civicdb.org and www.cancervariants.org). Recently, the development of algorithms and tools for immunogenomics has become a major focus of his lab (http://pvactools.org and http://vatools.org). The Griffith lab is becoming well known for work in genomics technology development, bioinformatics tool development, the clinical application of genomics analysis, and genomic data sharing.