A miRNA Host Response Signature Accurately Discriminates Acute Respiratory Infection Etiologies.

Clinical and translational research, COVID-19 therapeutics, clinical biomarkers for infectious disease.

Former Chief Data Officer for Quality, Duke Health
Former Director of Duke Forge
Former Director of Duke Crucible
Former Assistant Dean for Biomedical Informatics

Dr. Huang is currently Chief Science & Innovation Officer for Onduo by Verily, and Head of Clinical Informatics at Verily (Google's life sciences subsidiary), and is now adjunct faculty at Duke. Dr. Huang’s research interests span applied machine learning, research provenance and data infrastructure. Projects include building data provenance tools funded by the NIH’s Big Data to Knowledge program, regulatory science funded by the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation. Applied machine learning applications include “Deep Care Management” a highly interdisciplinary project with Duke Connected Care, Duke’s Accountable Care Organization, that integrates claims and EHR data for predicting unplanned admissions and risk stratifying patients for case management; CALYPSO, a collaboration with the Department of Surgery for utilizing machine learning to predict surgical complications. My team is also building the data platform for the Department of Surgery's "1000 Patients Project" an intensive biospecimen and biomarker study based around patients undergoing the controlled injury of surgery.

As Director of Duke Forge, Dr. Huang is working to build a data science culture and infrastructure across Duke University that focuses on actionable health data science. The Forge emphasizes scientific rigor, awareness that technology does not supersede clinicians’ responsibilities and human relationship with their patients, and the role of data science in society.

Dr. Geoffrey S. Ginsburg's research interests are in the development of novel paradigms for developing and translating genomic information into medical practice and the integration of personalized medicine into health care.

1. Emerging Infections
2. Global Health
3. Epidemiology of infectious diseases
4. Clinical microbiology and diagnostics
5. Bioterrorism Preparedness
6. Surveillance for communicable diseases
7. Antimicrobial resistance

My research at Duke has focused on understanding the dynamic between host and pathogen so as to discover and develop host-response markers that can diagnose and predict health and disease.  This new and evolving approach to diagnosing illness has the potential to significantly impact individual as well as public health considering the rise of antibiotic resistance.

With any potential infectious disease diagnosis, it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine at the time of presentation what the underlying cause of illness is.  For example, acute respiratory illness is among the most frequent reasons for patients to seek care. These symptoms, such as cough, sore throat, and fever may be due to a bacterial infection, viral infection, both, or a non-infectious condition such as asthma or allergies.  Given the difficulties in making the diagnosis, most patients are inappropriately given antibacterials.  However, each of these etiologies (bacteria, virus, or something else entirely) leaves a fingerprint embedded in the host’s response. We are very interested in finding those fingerprints and exploiting them to generate new approaches to understand, diagnose, and manage disease.

These principles also apply to sepsis, defined as life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated host response to infection. Just as with acute respiratory illness, it is often difficult to identify whether infection is responsible for a patient’s critical illness.  We have embarked on a number of research programs that aim to better identify sepsis; define sepsis subtypes that can be used to guide future clinical research; and to better predict sepsis outcomes.  These efforts have focused on many systems biology modalities including transcriptomics, miRNA, metabolomics, and proteomics.  Consequently, our Data Science team has utilized these highly complex data to develop new statistical methods, furthering both the clinical and statistical research communities.

These examples are just a small sampling of the breadth of research Dr. Tsalik and his colleagues have conducted.  

In April 2022, Dr. Tsalik has joined Danaher Diagnostics as the VP and Chief Scientific Officer for Infectious Disease, where he is applying this experience in biomarkers and diagnostics to shape the future of diagnostics in ID.