David Mittelman Joins Tute Genomics

By Bio-IT World Staff 

January 6, 2015 | David Mittelman, co-founder of Arpeggi and GCAT, the Genomics Comparison and Analytic Testing (GCAT) platform, has joined Tute Genomics as CSO.

Tute Genomics has made several strategic moves in the past months including a recent funding round to scale up their cloud-based genomics analytics, adding its genome annotation and interpretation platform to Illumina’s BaseSpace, and hiring a new VP of Sales.

Mittelman (@evolvability) is a particularly sharp addition to the team. “The addition of David’s leadership into our scientific team would tremendously improve our positioning within the genome interpretation market, and also help expand Tute’s offering in variant calling and clinical reporting”, said Kai Wang, PhD, President of Tute in a press release.

Mittelman has a well-established background in genomics. He participated in the Human Genome Project while at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and later received his PhD in Molecular Biophysics from Baylor College of Medicine. He completed his postdoctoral training at Baylor’s Human Genome Sequencing Center, under the direction of the center’s director, Richard Gibbs, PhD, and started his own NIH-funded research program as an associate professor at Virginia Tech where he developed variant calling tools used by the 1000 Genomes Project and other large-scale sequencing efforts.

In 2013, with Nir Leibovich and Jason Wang, Mittelman co-founded Arpeggi in a fragmented genome analytics market. Arpeggi’s focus was to extract the most data from genomic datasets using an integrated approach designed to scale well on local and cloud environments. The team also launched the GCAT toolkit, a free, cloud-based platform and community for evaluating the accuracy of NGS pipelines.

Both Arpeggi and GCAT were acquired by Gene by Gene in August 2013, and Mittelman served as the CSO at Gene by Gene until last month.

Mittelman’s broad investments in the bioinformatics community were already well-respected by the Tute team.

“I am indeed a regular user of the GCAT tool and the SeqAnswers forum that David has invested time into, and I greatly appreciate these contributions,” Wang continued in the release. “His commitment to data and knowledge sharing in the bioinformatics community impressed all of us at Tute.”

Mittelman acknowledges that variant interpretation is a crowded space, but believes that Tute is well-positioned to distinguish itself.

“I am thrilled to be joining the Tute Genomics team,” said Mittelman. “There is an excellent foundation here that includes Kai Wang’s ANNOVAR, one of the most used and widely cited tools for variant annotation, and Reid Robison’s crusade to make genome interpretation accessible to everyone.”