Blog

Ben Ebert is as fluent in the care of patients with blood disorders as he is applying the latest genomic technologies in his laboratory at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and with colleagues in the Broad’s Cancer Program. It’s all part of the same mission for Ben—to understand blood disorders and cancers at the genetic level to find ways to end the suffering of people with these illnesses.

Robots and the fleet of professional scientists who make sure the machines do their job in high-throughput screening may seem far afield from a fishing expedition. But that may be the best metaphor to explain how researchers at the Broad and elsewhere trawl for chemical compounds that might lead them to a new understanding of human biology.

At the Broad, collaboration is king. But in order to share ideas and data, scientists need a robust infrastructure that can support the volume and speed at which results are produced. That’s where Chief Information Officer Martin Leach and his team of experts in information technology and research computing come in. Their goal is to provide the software and technology that will enable the best collaboration experience, which will in turn accelerate groundbreaking science to transform medicine.

In this two-part series, we’ll give you a look at some of the tools, teams, and resources built by Broad Institute scientists to support the large-scale cancer sequencing project known as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).