IGSP Faculty

Erich S. Huang, MD, PhD

Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Surgery

We all understand pathways are not isolated circuits. It's more useful to think of them as modules that can interlock in different ways.

Erich Huang is Director, Cancer Research at Sage Bionetworks in Seattle, Washington. He is adjunct faculty in the Department of Surgery at Duke University, and an Adjunct Investigator in the Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. Erich's roots at Duke University are deep, having been born in the Davison Building in Duke South. After attaining his AB in History & Literature at Harvard College, Erich returned to Duke for his MD and his PhD in Genetics under the mentorship of Joseph Nevins. During his doctoral training Erich's dissertation work demonstrated that perturbation of oncogenic signaling pathways in vitro can evoke transcriptional changes that can be identified and validated in vivo in transgenic mouse models, as well as early genomic models of breast cancer lymph node metastasis.

Erich subsequently completed his Chief Residency in General Surgery at Duke and was full-time junior faculty in the Department of Surgery and an Investigator in the IGSP prior to taking his position at Sage Bionetworks. He is a recipient of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Research Foundation Translational Science Award.

Research Statement

Erich's research interests lie in using computation to inform experimentation and vice-versa. Erich has been applying factor modeling methods to decomposing cancer signaling pathways to better model the complexity of cancer phenotypes and therapeutic response. He has also used similar techniques to interrogate the peripheral blood transcriptome for prototype cancer diagnostics. Of particular interest is building infrastructure to support robust and transparent application of computation to genomic problems. At Duke, Erich began development of a platform for versioned and auditable models of disease, QUADRA, which is still being actively developed with the IGSP Computing Group, led by Mark Delong. A current focus is on Dataprint, a RESTful service for authenticating genomic data provenance. Additional research lies in: (1) Exploring methods for building a computational "handshake" as a test case for passing HIPAA-compliant data, models and methods to Sage Bionetworks' Synapse open access repository and compute platform. (2) Using cloud computing for supporting high performance genomic computation as well as transparent and accessible models and methods for the scientific community. (3) Cross-training young computational biologists in software engineering best practices (unit and integration testing) for deploying robust, transparent and scalable disease models as services in a cloud computing platform.