Brenda Andrews, PhD, University of Toronto

Dr. Brenda Andrews is a leader in the field of large scale genetics and genome biology that aims to understand how thousands of genes and their protein products work together in the cell. Last year, Dr. Andrews’ team and their collaborators developed a deep learning algorithm, DeepLoc, that can track protein movement in cells to help reveal what makes them healthy and what goes wrong in disease. DeepLoc brought down the time of data analysis from weeks to hours, vastly accelerating research that can be applied towards personalized medicine in which a person’s genetic make-up can be used to predict disease risk or tailor treatment. Variations of DeepLoc are being applied to help drug discovery by revealing how thousands of genetic mutations or drugs affect protein traffic in the cell.