Gad Getz, Ph.D.

Gad (Gaddy) Getz is an internationally acclaimed leader in cancer genomics and is pioneering widely used tools for analyzing cancer genomes. Getz is a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he directs the Cancer Genome Computational Analysis Group. Getz is a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, and he is a faculty member and director of bioinformatics in the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research and Department of Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). He is also the inaugural incumbent of the Paul C. Zamecnik Chair in Oncology at the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research at MGH.

The Getz Laboratory specializes in cancer genome analysis, which includes two major steps. The first is characterization — cataloging of all genomic events and the mechanisms that created them during the clonal evolution of cancer (starting from normal cells and progressing to premalignancy, primary cancer, and emergence of resistance), and comparing events at the DNA, RNA, and protein levels between tumor and normal samples from an individual patient. The second is interpretation — analysis of the characterization data across a cohort of patients with the aim of identifying the alterations in genes and pathways that drive cancer progression or increase its risk, as well as identifying molecular subtypes of the disease, their markers, and relationship to clinical variables.

In addition to his roles at the MGH and the Broad Institute, Getz is a co-PI of the primary The Cancer Genome Analysis (TCGA) Genome Data Analysis Center (GDAC) and leads this effort at the Broad; he is also a co-PI of the Broad’s Proteogenomics Data Analysis Center. He has been involved in numerous large-scale cancer genome projects such as the Tumor Sequencing Project (TSP) and the TCGA project (both pilot and extension), which generated and analyzed data from over ~10,000 samples of various cancers, using multiple profiling platforms. Getz has also been a co-leader of the international effort for pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes (PCAWG) as part of a joint effort between TCGA and the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC); was a member of the NCI’s Cancer Moonshot Blue Ribbon Panel; and co-led one of three NCI Cloud Pilots. He has published numerous papers in prominent journals describing new methodologies to study cancer genomes that have identified new genes and pathways involved in different tumor types, mutational signatures, and tumor evolution. His lab is currently interested in studying the heterogeneity and clonal evolution of many types of different cancers; single-cell analysis of tumors and the tumor microenvironment; drivers of resistance to therapies; the proteogenomic analysis of tumors; the role of somatic mutations in normal tissues; and other facets of the cancer genome.

Getz received his B.S. degree in physics and mathematics from Hebrew University and a M.Sc. in physics from Tel-Aviv University. He later earned a Ph.D. in physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He completed his postdoctoral training at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard with Todd Golub, where he focused on developing computational tools and analyzing expression of miRNAs across cancer.