Prof Larry Kedes

Professor Larry Kedes
Scientific Director and Senor Advisor, X PRIZE Foundation
Visiting Professor, Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles
Weston Visiting Professor, Weizmann Institute for Science

Email: kedes@usc.edu
Webpage link: http://genomics.xprize.org/

Dr. Laurence Kedes (BS, 1961; MD, 1962; BA (Hon), 2009) is the William M. Keck Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and of Medicine at the University of Southern California, Keck School of Medicine. He was the founding Director of the Institute for Genetic Medicine (IGM). Prior to joining USC, he had a 20-year career on the Stanford faculty of medicine where he pioneered molecular genetics and eukaryotic gene expression, while also serving as a clinical hematologist.

Dr. Kedes’s research interests have used molecular biology and molecular genetic technologies to study the differentiation of organisms and cells.  He has made numerous contributions to understanding the role of gene expression in generating cellular phenotypes.  He led the effort to successfully clone the first animal cell genes coding for a protein and to provide the first DNA sequence for animal protein genes. His interests in DNA sequences led him to formulate the need for bioinformatics methods to deal with such information and to collaborate in production of one of the first sets of computer programs (MOLGEN) to handle DNA sequence and other molecular genetic information.  These efforts led to the creation by Dr. Kedes and others of BioNet, the first national computer network (pre-internet) funded by the NIH to archive and make available for all scientists DNA sequence information.  The operation was the direct forerunner of GenBank, the international repository of all genetic sequences and helped form the foundation for the field of genomic bioinformatics.

In 2005, Dr. Kedes became the Scientific Director and Senior Advisor of the non-profit X PRIZE Foundation and helped lead the effort to create the $10 million Archon Genomics X PRIZE (http://genomics.xprize.org/).  The purpose of the Archon Genomics X PRIZE competition is to develop radically new technology that will dramatically reduce the time and cost of sequencing genomes, and accelerate a new era of predictive and personalized medicine. The X PRIZE Foundation aims to enable the development of low-cost diagnostic sequencing of human genomes.