Melissa Haendel

Last updated
Melissa Anne Haendel
Melissa Haendel.jpg
Haendel in 2020
Alma mater Reed College
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Known for Bioinformatics
Scientific career
Institutions Anschutz Medical Campus
Oregon Health & Science University
Oregon State University
Thesis Identification and characterization of the novel gene, axotrophin, using an in vitro gene trap preselection method  (1999)

Melissa Anne Haendel is an American bioinformaticist who is the Chief Research Informatics Officer of the Anschutz Medical Campus of the University of Colorado as well as a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and the Marsico Chair in Data Science. [1] [2] She serves as Director of the Center for Data to Health (CD2H). Her research makes use of data to improve the discovery and diagnosis of diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Haendel joined with the National Institutes of Health to launch the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), which looks to identify the risk factors that can predict severity of disease outcome and help to identify treatments.

Contents

Early life and education

Haendel earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry at Reed College. [3] Her undergraduate dissertation looked at designing pharmaceuticals using molecular electrostatic potentials (MEPs) to construct quantitative structure-activity relationships. [4] She moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison for her graduate studies, where she used in vitro gene trapping to study the gene axotrophin. [5] Her early career focussed on genetics and molecular biology. [6] In 2000 she moved to the University of Oregon as a postdoctoral researcher studying the role of thyroid hormones in the neural development of zebrafish.

Research and career

Haendel speaks at the National Human Genome Research Institute in 2016 Melissa Haendel at GM9 Next Steps Discussion.jpg
Haendel speaks at the National Human Genome Research Institute in 2016

Haendel started working in healthcare informatics in 2004. [6] She switched the focus of her research from neuroscience and the biology of zebrafish to the development of resources for the Oregon Health & Science University library. She was promoted to Associate Professor of Medical Informatics in 2015.[ citation needed ]

Haendel's research considers ontology development, biocuration and data harmonization. [6] Biocuration assembles information from patient records, research outputs and medical literature to create a quality-controlled, computable format. [6] She was previously the Director of Translational Data Science at the Linus Pauling Institute. [7] She currently holds the position of Chief Research Informatics Officer at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. [8]

Haendel believes that a globally consistent set of criteria, more comprehensive data collection, sharing and analysis will help to diagnose rare diseases. [9] Rare diseases are thought to impact 10% of the global population, meaning that there are considerable numbers of patients who are underserved by their healthcare systems. [10] In 2019, Haendel and the CD2H were awarded almost $9 million to make data related to cancer research more centralised and organised. [11] The Center for Cancer Data Harmonization makes use of a cloud-based portal to share data between physicians and cancer researchers across the country. [12]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States had no standardised means to collect and share clinical data. [13] [14] Haendel was concerned that the number of deaths and infections were not being accurately counted, and that this might compromise safe reopening. [15] In June 2020, Haendel formed the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), [16] which collates and analyses the medical record data of people with coronavirus disease. [17] The N3C looks to identify the risk factors that can predict severity of coronavirus disease and help to identify potential treatments. [17] It has work streams in data partnership, phenotypes, collaborative analytics, data harmonisation and data synthesis.[ citation needed ]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bioinformatics</span> Computational analysis of large, complex sets of biological data

Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, computer programming, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret biological data. The subsequent process of analyzing and interpreting data is referred to as computational biology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marco Marra</span> Canadian geneticist

Marco A. Marra is a Distinguished Scientist and Director of Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre at the BC Cancer Research Centre and Professor of Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He also serves as UBC Canada Research Chair in Genome Science for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and is an inductee in the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. Marra has been instrumental in bringing genome science to Canada by demonstrating the pivotal role that genomics can play in human health and disease research.

Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is a public research university focusing primarily on health sciences with a main campus, including two hospitals, in Portland, Oregon. The institution was founded in 1887 as the University of Oregon Medical Department and later became the University of Oregon Medical School. In 1974, the campus became an independent, self-governed institution called the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center, combining state dentistry, medicine, nursing, and public health programs into a single center. It was renamed Oregon Health Sciences University in 1981 and took its current name in 2001, as part of a merger with the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI), in Hillsboro. The university has several partnership programs including a joint PharmD Pharmacy program with Oregon State University in Corvallis.

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a compendium of many controlled vocabularies in the biomedical sciences. It provides a mapping structure among these vocabularies and thus allows one to translate among the various terminology systems; it may also be viewed as a comprehensive thesaurus and ontology of biomedical concepts. UMLS further provides facilities for natural language processing. It is intended to be used mainly by developers of systems in medical informatics.

Biomedical text mining refers to the methods and study of how text mining may be applied to texts and literature of the biomedical domain. As a field of research, biomedical text mining incorporates ideas from natural language processing, bioinformatics, medical informatics and computational linguistics. The strategies in this field have been applied to the biomedical literature available through services such as PubMed.

The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry is a group of people dedicated to build and maintain ontologies related to the life sciences. The OBO Foundry establishes a set of principles for ontology development for creating a suite of interoperable reference ontologies in the biomedical domain. Currently, there are more than a hundred ontologies that follow the OBO Foundry principles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yves A. Lussier</span>

Yves A. Lussier is a physician-scientist conducting research in Precision medicine, Translational bioinformatics and Personal Genomics. As a co-founder of Purkinje, he pioneered the commercial use of controlled medical vocabulary organized as directed semantic networks in electronic medical records, as well as Pen computing for clinicians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anschutz Medical Campus</span> University of Colorados health sciences-related schools and colleges

The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus is the academic health sciences campus in Aurora, Colorado that houses the University of Colorado's six health sciences-related schools and colleges, including the University of Colorado School of Medicine, the CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, the CU College of Nursing, the University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine, and the Colorado School of Public Health, as well as the graduate school for various fields in the biological and biomedical sciences. The campus also includes the 184-acre (0.74 km2) Fitzsimons Innovation Community, UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital, Children's Hospital Colorado, the Rocky Mountain Regional Veterans Affairs hospital, and a residential/retail town center known as 21 Fitzsimons. CU Anschutz is the largest academic health center in the Rocky Mountain region.

Xenbase is a Model Organism Database (MOD), providing informatics resources, as well as genomic and biological data on Xenopus frogs. Xenbase has been available since 1999, and covers both X. laevis and X. tropicalis Xenopus varieties. As of 2013 all of its services are running on virtual machines in a private cloud environment, making it one of the first MODs to do so. Other than hosting genomics data and tools, Xenbase supports the Xenopus research community though profiles for researchers and laboratories, and job and events postings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology</span> Indian scientific research institute

CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) is a scientific research institute devoted primarily to biological research. It is a part of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Literature-based discovery</span> Research method using published knowledge as data

Literature-based discovery (LBD), also called literature-related discovery (LRD) is a form of knowledge extraction and automated hypothesis generation that uses papers and other academic publications to find new relationships between existing knowledge. Literature-based discovery aims to discover new knowledge by connecting information which have been explicitly stated in literature to deduce connections which have not been explicitly stated.

The Uber-anatomy ontology (Uberon) is a comparative anatomy ontology representing a variety of structures found in animals, such as lungs, muscles, bones, feathers and fins. These structures are connected to other structures via relationships such as part-of and develops-from. One of the uses of this ontology is to integrate data from different biological databases, and other species-specific ontologies such as the Foundational Model of Anatomy.

Translational bioinformatics (TBI) is a field that emerged in the 2010s to study health informatics, focused on the convergence of molecular bioinformatics, biostatistics, statistical genetics and clinical informatics. Its focus is on applying informatics methodology to the increasing amount of biomedical and genomic data to formulate knowledge and medical tools, which can be utilized by scientists, clinicians, and patients. Furthermore, it involves applying biomedical research to improve human health through the use of computer-based information system. TBI employs data mining and analyzing biomedical informatics in order to generate clinical knowledge for application. Clinical knowledge includes finding similarities in patient populations, interpreting biological information to suggest therapy treatments and predict health outcomes.

The Monarch Initiative is a large scale bioinformatics web resource focused on leveraging existing biomedical knowledge to connect genotypes with phenotypes in an effort to aid research that combats genetic diseases. Monarch does this by integrating multi-species genotype, phenotype, genetic variant and disease knowledge from various existing biomedical data resources into a centralized and structured database. While this integration process has been traditionally done manually by basic researchers and clinicians on a case-by-case basis, The Monarch Initiative provides an aggregated and structured collection of data and tools that make biomedical knowledge exploration more efficient and effective.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">COVID-19 pandemic in Portland, Oregon</span> Ongoing COVID-19 viral pandemic in Portland, Oregon

The COVID-19 pandemic was confirmed to have reached Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon on February 28, 2020.

Allison Joan McGeer is a Canadian infectious disease specialist in the Sinai Health System, and a professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto. She also appointed at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and a Senior Clinician Scientist at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, and is a partner of the National Collaborating Centre for Infectious Diseases. McGeer has led investigations into the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in Toronto and worked alongside Donald Low. During the COVID-19 pandemic, McGeer has studied how SARS-CoV-2 survives in the air and has served on several provincial committees advising aspects of the Government of Ontario's pandemic response.

Biocuration is the field of life sciences dedicated to organizing biomedical data, information and knowledge into structured formats, such as spreadsheets, tables and knowledge graphs. The biocuration of biomedical knowledge is made possible by the cooperative work of biocurators, software developers and bioinformaticians and is at the base of the work of biological databases.

Daniel Richard Masys is an American biotechnologist and academic. He is an Affiliate Professor of Biomedical and Health Informatics at the University of Washington.

Suzanne B. Bakken Henry is an American nurse who is a professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University. Her research considers health equity and informatics. She is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, American College of Medical Informatics and American Academy of Nursing.

References

  1. "Melissa Haendel, PhD".
  2. "Melissa A. Haendel joins CU Anschutz as Chief Research Informatics Officer".
  3. "Melissa A. Haendel Ph.D. | OHSU People | OHSU". www.ohsu.edu. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
  4. Haendel, Melissa Anne (1991). Designing drugs: a new method using MEPs in constructing QSARs (Thesis). OCLC   268802607.
  5. Haendel, Melissa A (1999). Identification and characterization of the novel gene, axotrophin, using an in vitro gene trap preselection method. OCLC   608882841.
  6. 1 2 3 4 "Melissa Haendel, PhD | AMIA". www.amia.org. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
  7. "Melissa A. Haendel". Linus Pauling Institute. 2018-03-21. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
  8. "Melissa A. Haendel joins CU Anschutz as Chief Research Informatics Officer". CU Anschutz. 2021-03-04. Retrieved 2022-05-25.
  9. "Scientists suggest new solution to the rare-disease problem". EurekAlert!. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
  10. Haendel, Melissa; Vasilevsky, Nicole; Unni, Deepak (1 February 2020). "How many rare diseases are there?". Nature Reviews Drug Discovery . 19 (2): 77–78. doi:10.1038/D41573-019-00180-Y. ISSN   1474-1776. PMC   7771654 . PMID   32020066. Wikidata   Q89532791.
  11. "OSU awarded $8.8M grant to make cancer research accessible". KEZI News. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
  12. "Oregon State to help lead effort to make cancer research data more useful and accessible". Life at OSU. 2019-10-15. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
  13. sources, KTVZ news (2020-06-22). "OSU to use power of big data to help fight against COVID-19". KTVZ. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
  14. "Enlisting big data to accelerate the COVID-19 fight - News". UAB News. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
  15. Staff, Lincoln Graves, KATU (2020-05-18). "Accurate data on coronavirus still lacking in many areas". KATU. Retrieved 2020-06-28.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  16. "N3C Team". NIH NCATS.
  17. 1 2 "NIH launches analytics platform to harness nationwide COVID-19 patient". National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. 2020-06-15. Retrieved 2020-06-28.