Mike Lee joins Genomic Medicine Institute
Ming Ta (Mike) Lee, PhD, has joined Geisinger’s Genomic Medicine Institute, where he will assist in directing the MyCode Community Health Initiative. He will also contribute to ongoing work in pharmacogenomics, the study of how genes affect a person's response to drugs.
An experienced biobank leader, Dr. Lee will further develop the infrastructure and standard operating procedures for collecting, processing and shipping specimens to the central biobank. The goal is to have the MyCode biobank meet or exceed the standards established by national and international entities that oversee and certify biorepositories.
“We look forward to Dr. Lee’s contributions to expansion of the Geisinger MyCode biobank,” said David J. Carey, PhD, Chair of the Department of Molecular and Functional Genomics at Geisinger.
“The MyCode initiative provides a unique resource to link genomic and other data to longitudinal health information from MyCode participants, with the goal to improve health and medical care of Geisinger patients,” Dr. Carey said.
In previous research work, Dr. Lee has helped to establish the proper doses for key anticoagulant drugs using clinical and genomic information. People react differently to different doses of the same drugs, based partly on individual genomic variants. Knowing how genomic variants affect individual drug tolerance can improve efficiency, reduce side effects and even save lives, making pharmacogenomics a promising and vital area of research.
Dr. Lee most recently held positions in Japan and in his native Taiwan. He has been serving as a team leader at the Genomic Sciences Center in Yokohama, Japan, which forms part of the Japanese natural sciences research institute Rikagaku Kenkyusho, also known as RIKEN. He has also been working as an assistant research scientist at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Academia Sinica, in Taiwan. Educated at the University of Toronto in Canada and Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, where he earned his doctorate in molecular virology, Dr. Lee joined Geisinger on April 1. Mike Lee can be reached at mlee2@geisinger.edu or at 570-271-6664.
