Song Cao, PhD

Washington University in St. Louis (WU)

My research interests include cancer virology, cancer genomics, and cancer proteomics. I have a deep understanding of different omics data including DNA-Seq, RNA-Seq, scRNA-Seq, and mass spectrometry data. In the past, I led the development of several computational models and bioinformatics pipelines, such as VirusScan for virus detection from NGS data, Misplice tool for detecting splice-site-creating mutations, somaticwrapper and germlinewrapper pipelines for calling somatic and germline variants, neoscan pipeline for neoantigen prediction, and 10Xmapping tool for mapping mutations to scRNA-Seq data, etc. I am also interested in applying tools to realistic biological problems. For example, by using the MiSplice pipeline, we discovered ~1,900 coding and ~500 non-coding splice-site creating mutations from TCGA tumors, which were largely mis-annotated or ignored in the past. My ultimate goal is to understand cancer initialization and progression by integrating multiple levels of omics data, and provide therapeutic targets for clinical trials.