Jerry Lee

Dr. Jerry Lee is the Chief Science and Innovation Officer at the Ellison Institute of Technology and Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine, Chemical Engineering and Material Sciences, and Quantitative and Computational Biology at the University of Southern California. Prior to joining the Institute, Dr. Lee served for more than a decade as a Health Sciences Director within the National Cancer Institute's Office of the Director. Through direct support and use of public-public/public-private partnerships, he deployed programs focused on the integration of advanced technologies, trans-disciplinary approaches, infrastructures, and standards, to accelerate the creation of publicly available, broadly accessible, multi-dimensional data, knowledge, and tools to empower the entire cancer research continuum for patient benefit. In 2016, Dr. Lee was assigned to Office of the Vice President to serve as the Deputy Director for Cancer Research and Technology for the White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force and helped launch ongoing national programs including the Applied Proteogenomics Organizational Learning and Outcomes (APOLLO) Network and the Blood Profiling Atlas in Cancer Consortium. Dr. Lee's research involves elucidating the interplay between biophysical and biochemical drivers of age-related diseases. He earned his B.S. degree in biomedical engineering and Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

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Opportunities and Challenges in Implementation of Multiparameter Single Cell Analysis Platforms for Clinical Translation

My passion in public health research is heavily influenced by my training as a chemical and biomolecular engineer. As new technologies mature from basic discovery research to applied clinical research, it is important to reveal pre-analytical variables that may significantly contribute to generation of data or analytical interpretation of results while developing workflows. To enable broad adoption of workflows, it is essential to determine which pre-analytical variables can be further optimized with appropriate quality control verification criteria versus those that cannot in a real-world setting.  The high-content interrogation of single cells with platforms optimized for the multiparameter characterization of cells in liquid and solid biopsy samples can enable characterization of heterogeneous populations of cellsex vivo. However, it is important to understand the unique issues in resolving heterogeneity and variability at the single cell level before navigating the validation and regulatory requirements for these technologies to impact patient care. Significant challenges include the deconvolution of biological variation from technical uncertainty, the computational analysis of biological variations over time and space, and the integration of disparate -omics data. For nearly two decades, I've spearheaded national programs and public-private partnerships focused on assessing pre-analytical variables for technologies measuring molecular and cellular changes in patient biospecimens. In this presentation, I'll share insights and lessons from these initiatives.