CHARLES CHIU, MD, PHD
Assistant Professor, Department of Laboratory Medicine, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
Director, UCSF-Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center
Associate Director, UCSF Clinical Microbiology Laboratory, San Francisco, California.
The research in Charles’s laboratory is focused on the development of microarray and next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies for pathogen discovery and infectious disease diagnosis.
Charles received his MD, PhD degree in Biophysics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2001 and subsequently completed an internal medicine residency and clinical infectious diseases fellowship at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Joseph DeRisi at UCSF, he was instrumental in clinical and translational research applications of the ViroChip, a microarray for comprehensive detection and surveillance of viruses in clinical samples.
Since founding the UCSF-Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center (VDDC) and starting his own laboratory at UCSF in the Department of Laboratory Medicine in 2008, Charles reported the discovery of titi monkey adenovirus, a novel pathogen that caused a fulminant pneumonia outbreak in a New World monkey colony with cross-species transmission to a human researcher, and the Bas-Congo rhabdovirus, a novel virus associated with an acute hemorrhagic fever outbreak in central Africa.
Currently, his laboratory is involved in a wide range of projects including:
(1) implementation of unbiased NGS assays for real-time clinical diagnosis in the microbiology laboratory,
(2) identification of known and novel viruses associated with acute hemorrhagic fever, tickborne illnesses, encephalitis, and hepatitis
(3) development and validation of a bloodborne pathogen microarray for blood bank screening, and
(4) development of cloud-compatible bioinformatics pipelines for pathogen detection in NGS data from clinical samples, and
(5) transcriptome profiling of acute and chronic Lyme disease.
Charles is the principal investigator on multiple grants from the NIH and other institutions, and has more than 35 patents and peer-reviewed publications in major scientific journals. He is currently collaborating with Drs. Eric Delwart, Satish Pillai, and Graham Simmons at the BSRI on projects involving pathogen discovery, metagenomics, viral quasispecies analysis, and characterization of the proteins of Bas-Congo rhabdovirus.
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