Dr. Xiao serves as an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Xiao is internationally recognized in the field of Computational Genomics in Surgery and Medicine. He develops genomics tools and computational methods that can be widely applicable in clinical studies, study the human immuno-metabolic response in disease, and develop innovative approaches to address these challenges and to help translate genomic studies of patients to better disease diagnosis, prevention and therapeutics.

His area of expertise is in knowledge based analysis for the interpretation and integration of genomic data and computation to translate genome technologies to clinical research. For high-throughput, cost-effective analyses of human transcriptome in large scale patient studies, he developed the most comprehensive GeneChip to date (in collaboration with Affymetrix and Wing Wong). Comparing with RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) data, the array is shown to be highly reproducible in estimating expression at both gene and exon levels and reliable in detection of alternative splicing. In collaboration with Dr. Ron Davis and Stanford Genome Technology Center, we have developed bioinformatic and statistical tools for data analysis, especially for alternative splicing. This platform has been made commercially available by Affymetrix and used in multiple clinical studies by different groups. We further evaluated the performance of the array as part of the FDA Sequencing Quality Control (SEQC) Consortium, and developing approaches to improve and apply RNA-seq and arrays in combination to large-scale clinical studies.

Representative publications

Fu G, Xu W, Wilhelmy J, Mindrinos MN, Davis RW, Xiao W, et al. Molecular indexing enables quantitative targeted RNA sequencing and reveals poor sampling efficiencies in standard library preparations. 2014. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A (in press)

The SEQC consortium. Power and Limitations of RNA-Seq: findings from the SEQC (MAQC-III) consortium. 2014. Nature Biotechnology (in press)

Seok J, Xu W, Gao H, Davis RW, Xiao W. JETTA: junction and exon toolkits for transcriptome analysis. Bioinformatics. 2012 May; 28(9):1274-5. PubMed PMID: 22433281; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3338022

Seok J, Xu W, Jiang H, Davis RW, Xiao W. Knowledge-based reconstruction of mRNA transcripts with short sequencing reads for transcriptome research. PLoS One. 2012 Feb; 7(2):e31440. PubMed PMID: 22312447; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3270033

Logan AC, Gao H, Wang C, Sahaf B, Jones CD, Marshall EL, et al. High-throughput VDJ sequencing for quantification of minimal residual disease in chronic lymphocytic leukemia and immune reconstitution assessment. PNAS. 2011 Dec 27; 108(52):21194-9. PubMed PMID: 22160699; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3248502

Xiao W, Mindrinos MN, Seok J, Cuschieri J, Cuenca AG, Gao H, et al. A genomic storm in critically injured humans. J Exp Med. 2011 Dec; 208(13):2581-90. PubMed PMID: 22110166; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3244029

Xu W, Seok J, Mindrinos MN, Schweitzer AC, Jiang H, Wilhelmy J, et al. Human transcriptome array for high-throughput clinical studies. PNAS. 2011 Mar; 108(9):3707-12. PubMed PMID: 21317363; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3048146

Qian WJ, Petritis BO, Kaushal A, Finnerty CC, Jeschke MG, Monroe ME, et al. Plasma proteome response to severe burn injury revealed by 18O-labeled “universal” reference-based quantitative proteomics. J Proteome Res. 2010 Sept; 9(9):4779-89. PubMed PMID: 20698492; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2945297

Kotz KT, Xiao W, Miller-Graziano C, Qian WJ, Russom A, Warner EA, et al. Clinical microfluidics for neutrophil genomics and proteomics. Nat Med. 2010 Sept; 16(9):1042-7. PubMed PMID: 20802500; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3136804

Information

Wenzhong Xiao, Ph.D.
Division of Surgery, Science and Bioengineering
Massachusetts General Hospital
38 Sidney Street
Cambridge, MA 02139

View Wen’s Harvard Catalyst profile