Alexander Wyatt

I am an Assistant Professor with an academic focus on cancer genomics. I have a broad background in basic molecular biology and genetics, as well as 8 years of experience in cancer bioinformatics and the analysis of complex datasets. My primary research goals are to dissect the clinical relevance of genomic alterations in metastatic genitourinary cancers, and develop minimally-invasive biomarkers for guiding therapy selection. We leverage a variety of innovative next-generation sequencing techniques to interrogate tissue and liquid biopsies from patients enrolled on a series of ongoing clinical trials and protocols. My lab works very closely with Dr. Kim Chi and other senior medical oncologists and urologists, and together we have recently demonstrated that plasma circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) is highly representative of metastatic lesions in prostate and bladder cancer, and that somatic alterations detected in ctDNA can help predict therapy resistance or response. We currently run a phase II ‘umbrella trial’ to prospectively test this concept in 500 patients with metastatic prostate cancer.