4DB Center: Physics of Metastasis over Time and Space

Dr. Lasken directs a robust program in genomics and whole genome amplification technologies. Previously, he was a Professor at the Center for Genomic Sciences at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. He is an experienced molecular biologist with 24 years of work in the fields of DNA replication and amplification. As the first employee of Molecular Staging Inc., he built a genomics department of 20 scientists and developed MDA amplification which is licensed under the brand names TempliPhi and GenomiPhi (GE Healthcare) and REPLI-g (Qiagen). He is the lead inventor on a patent enabling these products. His laboratory was the first to sequence genomic DNA from a single. He is currently funded by the NHGRI to develop methods for single cell sequencing of uncultured nicrobes from the human microbiome. Dr. Lasken is guiding the JCVI’s work to expand its state-of-art single cell sorting capabilities into a high-throughput production pipeline. His lab infrastructure includes a Becton Dickenson Aria flow cytometer that is available for the proposed cell sorting activities.