Arizona State University

Biodesign Institute
Center for Personalized Diagnostics

Funded by a multimillion gift from Piper Trust, the Center for Personalized Diagnostics will pursue earlier, more accurate diagnosis of diseases including lung cancer and diabetes. It will leverage the latest capabilities in personalized medicine, an emerging field with potential to improve patient treatments and outcomes by factoring in an individual’s unique genetic and metabolic profile.

The Center occupies 8,000 sq. ft. within the Biodesign Institute. In addition to the recruitment of Joshua LaBaer PhD, the Piper Trust's philanthropic investment supports development of the research team and laboratory infrastructure such as a state-of-the-art robotic system for gene cloning.

LaBaer’s team will play a major role in biomarker discovery and validation for lung cancer and diabetes in collaboration with the larger Partnership for Personalized Medicine, which also includes TGen in Phoenix and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute in Seattle.

Joshua LaBaer created the Institute of Proteomics as a research program within the Harvard Medical School to promote collaborative research and discoveries. Using new high-throughput technologies, his team advanced the discipline of functional proteomics, which seeks to understand the roles of all the proteins made in the human body. They also developed new technologies to discover new disease targets, including the identification of blood-borne markers to discover the molecular signatures of the autoimmune cause of Type I diabetes as well as identification of cancer markers.

About the Center

The Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics at ASU will be the focal part of biomarker discovery and validation in a high throughput and high quality control manner. Effective biomarkers have the potential to improve health care and reduce costs by detecting diseases at an earlier stage when they are more easily managed and by more effectively managing patients to handle disease.