CLINICAL PROTEOMICS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Scientific Advisor
Ben Orsburn received his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech for using mass spectrometry to study the cell walls of bacterial pathogens. He performed two postdoctoral fellowships, at the Johns Hopkins University and the National Cancer Institute, respectively where he expanded his skills toward the transcriptomics and proteomics of cancer.
After extensive trainings in mass spectrometry and proteomics, he spent 8 years traveling the globe as a senior field applications scientist in proteomics for Thermo Fisher Scientific. To date, he has helped to develop advanced applications in proteomics and metabolomics in over 160 labs around the world.
He is the founder of News in Proteomics Research, the highest frequently visited mass spectrometry and proteomics blog on the internet, dedicated to breaking down today's most relevant advances in the field in the most approachable format possible. He is a contributing author of over 40 scientific articles and editorials, as well as three books on mass spectrometry. In 2018 he founded LCMSMethods.org, a site dedicated to improving proteomics and mass spectrometry through the release of instrument methods curated by subject matter experts. For this work he was awarded a position on the Workflow Interest Network of the Association of Biomedical Research Facilities. His research has been featured in Science Daily, GenomeWeb and other media outlets. In March of 2020 his work on accelerating the development of COVID diagnostic assays received mainstream media attention.
Today, he has returned to Johns Hopkins as a faculty member in the Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences. His research is focused on the application of proteomics and single-cell proteomics toward more comprehensive understanding of drug activity and toxicity.
Christopher Adewole is working with Complete Omics as a Bioinformatician. He is an undergraduate student attending the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and double-majoring in Biochemical Engineering and Bioinformatics/Computational Biology. In addition to his part-time work with Complete Omics, Chris serves as a Peer Tutor for student-athletes, an Exam Proctor, and as a Residential Assistant on campus. Chris' work at Complete Omics is centered around engineering automated protein data retrieval tools and methods. The goal of this research is to design a tool that will expedite data-collection towards proteomics research and to develop a template for the research and implementation of scoring heuristics to identify the most viable proteins for clinical trials based on peptide structure and uniqueness. Chris is excited to explore computer science applications towards clinical research and hopes to uncover new possibilities for chemical engineering approaches to bioinformatics and vice versa.
Hamza Umar is major in Mechanical Engineering and he has held various student leadership positions at Howard Community College, participated in a physics-related project, and published a physics paper on Chaos Theory in a double pendulum problem. He then joined the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and at UMBC he has been a teaching assistant for Calculus, a lab assistant for Pre-calculus, and an engineering Teaching Fellow for Computational Methods for Engineering. He is working in Complete Omics on a pioneering project related to 3D printing and material engineering and he wishes to make a direct contribution to the healthcare of human beings.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Scientific Advisor
Liang Zhao received his Ph.D. degree of Analytical Chemistry in 2011 from University of the Pacific. He then continued his research in analytical chemistry by pursuing a post-doctoral training in Johns Hopkins University Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In 2012, he took the initiative, as a core member, in establishing the CAAT center's metabolomic core facility and took the leadership for two research projects related to toxicological mechanism studies using a variety of metabolomic technologies. In 2014, he reported a high-throughput metabolic profiling strategy which made characterization of a series of in vitro 3D brain models possible for the prediction of developmental neurotoxicity and neurodegeneration. His work was published on PNAS.
After joining the School of Medicine in Johns Hopkins University as a faculty member in 2017, his research interest has been focusing on tumor- and immuno- metabolomics. As the only faculty member dedicated to metabolomics in the center, he is responsible for project design, training graduate student and lab management. In his research of this period of time, he led his team and developed a stable isotope labeling (carbon/nitrogen tracing) technique to explore the metabolic activities of different cell subsets in tumor micro-environment. With this state-of-the-art approach he has developed, a series of surprising differences in metabolic pathways fueling cancer cells and effector T cells were discovered and a representative work was recently published on SCIENCE in 2019. Now his discoveries are being further exploited as a metabolic checkpoint for a variety of novel cancer therapeutics by numerous research institutions and pharmaceuticals.
He is striving in integrating mass spectrometry, molecular biology and bioinformatics to explore the biomedical importance of metabolites, and to better translate metabolomics findings into clinical applications, such as the development of new biomarker and AI-enhanced diagnostic panels, as well as exploring novel therapeutic approaches for cancers.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Scientific Advisor
Ming Zhang obtained her Bachelor's degree and her PhD degree in Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from Nankai University with a research focus on disease-causing gene identification and signaling pathway analysis. She then pursued her Postdoctoral training in the University of Rochester in New York, USA and joined Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as a Research Associate Faculty and obtained her certificate of genetics and genome analysis. Her research interest is to develop new NGS technologies and to apply them to cancer diagnostics and therapeutics.
Ming is the only Research Faculty focusing on cancer genome under the direction of Dr. Bert Vogelstein. In recent years, she has finished large-scale cancer genome analysis for numerous human cancers, including pancreatic cancer, GI track cancers, brain cancer, and endometrial cancer, etc. By defining the genomic landscapes of these cancers, her work has supported the identification of cancer-associated biomarkers and therapeutic targets including several kinases and metabolic enzymes, which are now prevailing drug targets under investigation of major pharmaceutical companies. A lot of genetic biomarkers have been identified from Ming's work for early cancer diagnostics and many of them have been approved by WHO and are being used in hospitals globally. In the recent 5 years, Ming and Dr. Vogelstein have published over 30 research papers together on high profile scientific journals, such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Genetics, PNAS, Cancer Discovery, Gastroenterology etc., and her recent findings have been cited for over 4000 times.
Parth Parikh is interested in the interactions of the immune system with pathogens, the development of cancer, and potential treatments/cures. This curiosity drove him to pursue medical school after college. He aspires to become an orthopedic surgeon and serves in the US Navy as a medical officer in a few years. His passion for helping others has never been stronger, and he hopes to do so while he is a part of Complete Omics. With his work on developing novel diagnostics methods, he hopes to help improve current technologies in diagnostics.
Job Titles:
- CEO
- Founder
- Member of the Leadership Team
Dr. Wang graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a PhD, supervised by Dr. Bert Vogelstein at the School of Medicine, and an MHS in Biostatistics, supervised by Dr. Rafael Irizarry at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Before coming to the US, he obtained his BS and MS in Molecular Biology from Nankai University and trained with Dr. Tianhui Zhu, the Founding Dean of Nankai University School of Medicine. Dr. Wang is also currently pursuing an Executive MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and will obtain his degree in 2023.
During the past 15 years, Dr. Wang's research has focused on clinical proteomics and clinical genomics. In 2007, Dr. Wang joined Dr. Bert Vogelstein's lab at JHU as a PhD student and, at the time, the Vogelstein group had just finished the world's first cancer genome sequencing. Dr. Wang initiated a program for clinical multi-omics analysis for human cancers after he joined. In 2010, Dr. Wang developed the world's first mutant protein detection and quantification platform, "MT-SRM", a pipeline capable of quantifying protein copy numbers in a single human cell with mass spectrometry after NGS targeted sequencing. Next, Dr. Wang developed the first scalable proteomics biomarker discovery and validation platform, "SAFE-SRM", which launched the use of mass spectrometry-based proteomics into the clinical setting. He systematically evaluated and compared the benefits and problems of utilizing different omics technologies in cancer early detection. In 2019, he invented the pipeline "MANA-SRM" and "Valid-NEO" for direct detection and quantification of neoantigens from cells and minute quantities of human tumor tissue, which has paved the way for a new generation of personalized cancer therapeutics. Recently, he developed a comprehensive clinical proteomics molecular diagnostics platform, Complete360®, which enables multi-omics-based quantification of a large number of biomarkers in human body fluid samples. On a minor note, he also invented and patented "DEEPER-Seq", the world's only barcoded single-stranded library and dual RNA probe-based targeted sequencing platform for ultra-rare mutation calling with Next Generation Sequencing (NGS). Dr. Wang's research has been featured in major media outlets, including Genomeweb, Newswire, ScienceDaily, and numerous major media from China as well as traditional high-impact peer-reviewed journals.
Through Complete Omics Inc., Dr. Wang is working to break the boundaries between different fields in medicine and the life sciences and to comprehensively leverage the features of omics technologies to achieve improved personalized disease management and precision medicine.
Raj Purohit, a double major in chemical engineering and biology, has experience in cell culture, protein expression, and diagnostic assays. His parents moved to Maryland from India and then moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he was born. When he was four, he moved to Cockeysville, Maryland, and has stayed since. With a large passion for STEM, especially in biotechnology, he has studied and participated in a large variety of different projects in biotechnology developments with numerous labs. He works with Complete Omics to develop cutting-edge technologies for mass spectrometry-based biomarker detection.
Stanley Wang, an undergraduate from UMBC, major in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Economics, and minoring in entrepreneurship. In 2019, Stanley was selected to participate in The Shattuck Family Internship Program for Entrepreneurship Innovation and Social Change, which funds and places highly-motivated students from diverse backgrounds in internships to better prepare them to launch start-ups or nonprofits. Stanley showed interests, and after interviews, joined Complete Omics. Stanley created an automatic pipeline for mass spectrometry method building with a minimal amount of human intervention. He had been dedicated to his work, which had facilitated an important clinical project including the method build for over 10,000 protein biomarkers.
Yuri Laguna Terai was born in Spain. Since childhood, she has been fancy about the mysteries in biology and life science. She decided to pursue a biology major in her undergraduate. During her undergraduate study, Yuri scored a 3.9 GPA with fruitful experience of extracurricular activities including volunteer experiences and paid jobs such as working in the school cafeteria. Having a family member who was diagnosed with colon cancer, she became more interested in disease early diagnostics and health surveillance. By being a part of Complete Omics she hopes to integrate multi-omics clinical applications to the diagnosis of cancers and other ailments. Her role in Complete Omics is to focus on the development of a clinical proteomics-based diagnostics pipeline.