Photo of Dr. Atul Butte.

Inside Stanford Medicine - April 23, 2012

Atul Butte, MD, PhD, associate professor of systems medicine in pediatrics, has received a four-year, $2.5 million grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The new funds will be used to identify relationships among myriad diseases by analyzing massive amounts of biomolecular and clinical data resident in public repositories.

Butte’s team pairs the abundant data now available from gene-expression, genetics and proteomics studies and the vast amounts of available information on biomarkers and drug targets for numerous disease indications. “There is now an opportunity to integrate these data into a unified, globally coherent representation of human disease,” said Butte, who is also director of the Center for Pediatric Bioinformatics at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. “This will help us come up with new diagnostics and therapeutics.”

Butte has previously found surprising similarities in the molecular pathologies of seemingly distant diseases, and has shown in proof-of-principle experiments that drugs approved for one disorder in such a pair can be effective against the other. One of his recent studies, for instance, suggested that a common anti-ulcer drug may be effective for a form of lung cancer and that an anti-seizure medication could be useful in treating inflammatory bowel disease.

The grant will enable new collaborations with professor Daphne Koller, PhD, and assistant professor Jeffrey Heer, PhD, of the School of Engineering’s computer science department, and Julien Sage, associate professor of pediatrics.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE STANFORD MEDICINE