Kevin White

Affiliation

• Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Precision Medicine, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS
• Principal Investigator, Cancer Science Institute of Singapore, NUS
• Program Director, Nucleic Acids Therapeutics, GIS A*STAR
• Founder and Chairman, Provaxus Inc

Research Interest

The White lab works in the fields of functional genomics and systems biology, using large-scale biological data-sets to generate biological insights and create new directions in diagnostic and therapeutic development to treat cancer and other disorders. Currently, focusing on developing new approaches for accelerating precision medicine through the development of nucleic acid based therapeutics and cellular engineering.

Prof. White has worked at the interface of technology development and application to biological problems for over 20 years. The teams that he leads are committed to using genomic and computation/analytics tools, and an iterative experimental systems biology approach, to distill explanatory or predictive models from the complexity of multi-genic and epigenetic processes that underlie development, evolution and disease. Over the years Prof White’s laboratory has developed and used experimental and computational genomics and systems biology toolkits to delineate the basic architecture of transcriptional genomic systems in the development of model systems, to uncover basic principles of gene regulatory evolution in model organisms and humans, to identify conserved oncogenes and tumor suppressors, and to shed light on the transcriptional networks that go awry in cancers and discover novel drug targets in those same cancers as a result.

Prof White’s lab has also contributed significantly to the mapping and functional characterization of the human genome in general through the NIH Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, and to mapping the genomic architecture of the human brain in neuropsychiatric disorders through the NIH PsychENCODE project, including the systematic identification and characterization of non-coding regions of the human genome predicted to be enhancers that contribute to the development of neuropsychiatric diseases. In the last few years Prof. White’s team has also developed tools and systems for managing and mining massive genomic datasets. They have thus discovered and characterized in model cell systems dozens of novel recurrent fusion genes in human cancers, identified previously unrecognized risk factors for human diseases including cancers, and they have developed predictive algorithms that match specific cancer patients to specific treatments. Prof White is also actively engaged in commercialization of genomic and systems biology approaches for developing novel diagnostics and therapeutics. He has had founder and executive roles at companies such as Tempus Labs, HealthSeq Asia, and Provaxus.