Meet Ben Berman

How did you get into bioinformatics?

I started my career as a computer scientist – I undertook a Bachelor of Computer Science degree at the University of California, Berkeley and began my career in computational biology by developing software pipelines to decode the complete genome of the fruit fly?Drosophila melanogaster?in 2000. I went on to study non-coding gene regulatory elements in the?Drosophila?genome, completing a PhD in Molecular and Computational Biology at UC Berkeley in 2006.

I moved to Los Angeles to join the faculties of the University of Southern California and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, as a Principal Investigator and a Director of Bioinformatics. During that time, I published the first complete DNA methylation map of human cancer and was funded as a Principal Investigator in several cancer-related consortia of the US National Cancer Institute, including?The Cancer Genome Atlas.

In 2019, I moved my family and my lab to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, in part to collaborate with researchers there working on DNA methylation and liquid biopsy. The focus of my research has been the development of new sequencing and bioinformatics methods to understand chromatin architecture and gene regulation in normal development and cancer.

How did you hear about Volition?

I’d been aware of the work of Volition for quite some time as I previously worked with?Dr. Terry Kelly, Volition’s Chief Innovation Officer. During my time at the University of Southern California, we worked in the USC/Norris Cancer Center together on several epigenetic sequencing projects focusing on the genome-wide dynamics and composition of nucleosomes in normal cells and in cancer. A major part of this work was the development of NOMe-Seq - a whole genome sequencing approach enabling scientists to look at both nucleosomes and DNA methylation in the same DNA molecule, as a combined signature. We made a great team, with Terry leading the development on the bench side and my group leading the analysis on the computation side.

I was keen to work with Terry again as she’s a tour de force in developing and implementing new ideas. We started working together again on a collaborative basis when she joined Volition, with her team at the innovation lab and my academic lab. I am very excited to join Volition and work full time as part of Volition’s mission to develop innovative epigenetic technologies that will ultimately lead to better outcomes for patients.

Volition has a powerful, low-cost epigenetic technology (Nu.Q?) that could be used to monitor a patient over time as they undergo disease treatment. The availability of affordable, accessible testing means you could monitor patients at more frequent intervals and look for drug resistance or disease recurrence and help guide downstream treatment. This low-cost and rapid assessment nicely couples with our research efforts using high-throughput sequencing, which is necessary to understand the underlying biology, and will over time become more affordable as a routine clinical option.

Read the full Q&A on our website.