(Press-News.org) CHICAGO ― John N. Weinstein, M.D., Ph.D., chair of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and professor of Systems Biology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, has been elected to the 2025 class of Fellows of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Academy in recognition of decades of combined laboratory and computational work pioneering multi-omic molecular profiling, including the introduction of new laboratory techniques, clustered heat maps, and early innovations in artificial intelligence for cancer drug discovery.
The mission of the AACR Academy is to honor distinguished scientists whose contributions have propelled significant progress and breakthroughs against cancer. Weinstein is part of a select cohort of 33 distinguished scientists, rigorously reviewed and chosen by the AACR Academy for their exceptional contributions driving innovation and progress against cancer.
Weinstein joins 15 previously elected fellows from MD Anderson, including current members, James P. Allison, Ph.D., Neal G. Copeland, Ph.D., Ronald A. DePinho, M.D., Andy Futreal, Ph.D., Nancy A. Jenkins, Ph.D., Margaret L. Kripke, Ph.D., Guillermina (Gigi) Lozano, Ph.D., Helen Piwnica-Worms, Ph.D., Padmanee Sharma, M.D., Ph.D., and Louise C. Strong, M.D. Former members, now deceased, include Isaiah J. Fidler, D.V.M., Ph.D., Emil J Freireich, M.D., Waun Ki Hong, M.D., V. Craig Jordan, Ph.D., and John Mendelsohn, M.D.
“Dr. Weinstein has made substantial contributions to advancing our knowledge of the molecular profiles of cancer, and we celebrate his recognition as a Fellow of the AACR Academy,” said Peter WT Pisters, M.D., president of MD Anderson. “His crucial data science work includes the creation of countless analytical tools that help translate breakthrough discoveries into clinical advances that improve the lives of patients.”
Weinstein earned a B.A. in Biology, a Ph.D. in Biophysics and an M.D. from Harvard University, and he completed his internship and residency in Medicine at Stanford University. Throughout his career, he led hybrid laboratory and computational research groups, and, since the early 1990s, he has focused on integrative multi-omic studies and issues of data quality control. At the National Cancer Institute (NCI), he headed the Genomics and Bioinformatics Faculty and a computational Immunology section.
Since 1991, Weinstein’s research has focused on molecular profiling of cancer with an emphasis on drug discovery. In 1992, he began characterizing the NCI-60 human cancer cell lines at the DNA, RNA, protein and epigenomic levels – the first large multi-omic profiling project – which provided a design template for the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia and Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer projects, as well as contributing to some major aspects of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project and its descendants.
One of Weinstein’s many analytical tools, the color-coded clustered heat map (CHM), provides an intuitive visualization of patterns in complex biological data. This tool led to the clinical development of oxaliplatin, a chemotherapy drug that has become a standard component of treatment for colorectal, pancreatic and other cancers. The CHM became a ubiquitous form for visualization of -omics data, and Weinstein is now introducing artificial intelligence to improve its characteristics as a dynamically interactive next-generation CHM.
His work overall has contributed to the “Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR)” principles of Data Science, established guidelines for managing and sharing research data to maximize their potential value and facilitate discovery.
“Dr. Weinstein is an exemplary leader in the field of bioinformatics, and his discovery work has generated tremendous lasting benefits for the scientific community,” said Giulio Draetta, M.D., Ph.D., chief scientific officer at MD Anderson. “We are proud to have him as part of our MD Anderson research community, and he joins an incredible group of scientists in the AACR Academy.”
In 2008, Weinstein was recruited to MD Anderson to build the Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, which he still chairs. He also serves as a scientific advisor to MD Anderson’s Proteomics, Functional Proteomics Reverse Phase Protein Array (RPPA), Metabolomics and Single Cell Genomics Cores. Since 2009, he has been a principal investigator of MD Anderson’s NCI Genome Data Analysis Center, and he served for 18 months as chair of the NCI TCGA Network Steering Committee. He is a founding affiliate member of MD Anderson’s Institute for Data Science in Oncology and serves as director of the Bioinformatics Shared Resource.
Weinstein was awarded the Hubert L. Stringer Chair for Research in 2015 and has received STARS and STARS-PLUS awards from The University of Texas at Austin, as well as a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Core Grant for proteomics and metabolomics. He has received generous funding from The Mary K. Chapman Foundation and Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. With more than 400 publications – including 14 first-author publications in Science or Nature – and over 150,000 literature citations, Weinstein was recognized as “a highly cited researcher of the decade” by the Web of Science in 2020.
Read this press release in the MD Anderson Newsroom. More information on all MD Anderson AACR Annual Meeting content can be found at MDAnderson.org/AACR.
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