Optimizing collaboration between lead identifiers and genomic analysts in pharma and biotech companies

Interviewer: With us today is Dr. Fritz Sedlazeck, an Associate Professor at Baylor College of Medicine and Adjunct at Rice University. Dr. Sedlazeck is a leading expert in computational genomics, and the author of several highly cited tools such as Sniffles and SURVIVOR. He also actively contributes to major national and international genomics efforts and regularly collaborates with sequencing technology and pharmaceutical companies such as Illumina and Genentech. Fritz, thank you very much for joining us today. Dr. Sedlazeck: Thank you so much for inviting me. Interviewer: Can you start by taking us a bit over your experience over the past years, your focus, and your collaborations with industry in that context? Dr. Sedlazeck: Absolutely. As you highlighted, I'm an academic basic science lab developing methods and algorithms, but also striving in genomics and identifying complex regions and studying them when it comes to different human diseases. In that role, I had the pleasure of working with multiple companies as well over the last couple of years. The majority of them are in the biotechnology sector such as sequencing companies like Illumina that you already mentioned, but also PacBio and Oxford Nanopore, which are producing these longer reads that allow us to assess repetitive regions. There, we are engaged mainly on developing algorithms together. Either on both sides, it was quite successful and mutually great to work with them. Then, most recently, we also had the pleasure over the last few years to work with a group from Genentech on improving cancer characterization. So trying to bridge a little bit, both what my lab is doing, which is trying to utilize novel sequencing technologies, as I said, to assess or more carefully characterize repetitive regions but also more complex variations