Author Archives: Christophe Lambert

About Christophe Lambert

Dr. Christophe Lambert is the Chairman of Golden Helix, Inc., a bioinformatics software and services company he founded in Bozeman, MT, USA in 1998. Dr. Lambert graduated with his Bachelors in Computer Science from Montana State University in 1992 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University in 1997. He has performed interdisciplinary research in the life sciences for over twenty years.

Is Illumina Aiming to Compete with its Customers?

         February 12, 2013

In a recent GenomeWeb article by Tony Fong, “Sequenom’s CEO ‘Puzzled’ by Illumina’s Buy of Verinata, Lays out 2013 Goals at JP Morgan,” Harry Hixson, Sequenom’s CEO, expresses puzzlement over why its major supplier, Illumina, is acquiring a Sequenom competitor in Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT), and thus apparently competing with one of its major customers. In a JP Morgan interview… Read more »

Learning vs. Doing (or why that Ph.D. took 10 years)

         August 15, 2012

What prevents scientists from being more productive and if we knew, could we do anything about it? I’d like to look at an often overlooked, but huge productivity inhibitor — bad multitasking. Many people put “excellent multitasker” on their resume as a badge of honor. We laud the efficiency of a good multitasker — they are rarely idle — someone… Read more »

Learning From Our GWAS Mistakes: From experimental design to scientific method

         March 7, 2012

This month Biostatistics published online an open access article I co-authored with Dr. Laura Black from Montana State University: “Learning From Our GWAS Mistakes: From Experimental Design To Scientific Method.” The paper version is expected to come out in the April 2012 issue. I’m hoping that you will take the time to read it. And I’m hoping you will violently… Read more »

Influencing the Global Dialog on Healthcare

         September 28, 2011

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5CUPMD0Agk On September 16-17th, I attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperative (APEC) Health Systems Innovation Policy Dialog in San Francisco. It was a stimulating opportunity to look at global healthcare concerns from the perspective of developing and developed economies. There was much opportunity to  dialog and frame the issues around transforming healthcare systems to meet pressing problems such as aging populations,… Read more »

“Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a bioinformatician!”

         May 12, 2011

Academic Software, Productivity, and Reproducible Research httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGMLCxKPMSE&NR=1 Do you ever feel like Dr. McCoy on Star Trek, where your job and expertise is to do x, but to achieve your goals you also have to do y and z, which you either don’t want to do or don’t have the skills to do? Genetic researchers are faced with this every… Read more »

Stop Ignoring Experimental Design (or my head will explode)

         September 29, 2010
Stop Ignoring Experimental Design (or my head will explode)

Over the past 3 years, Golden Helix has analyzed dozens of public and customer whole-genome and candidate gene datasets for a host of studies.  Though genetic research certainly has a number of complexities and challenges, the number one problem we encounter, which also has the greatest repercussions, is born of problematic experimental design. In fact, about 95% of the studies… Read more »

Missing Heritability and the Future of GWAS

         August 26, 2010

“Where is the missing heritability?” is a question asked frequently in genetic research, usually in the context of diseases that have large heritability estimates, say 60-80%, and yet where only perhaps 5-10% of that heritability has been found. The difficulty seems to come down to the common disease/common variant hypothesis not holding up. Or perhaps more accurately, that the frequency… Read more »

Rising Above Uncertainty; Increasing Clinical Yield in Array-Based Cytogenetics

         July 27, 2010

As Andy Ferrin and I drove the five-hour car ride home from a cytogenetics conference, we had a lot of time to reflect on the persistent themes we heard in presentations and dialog among conference attendees. Taking somewhat of an outsider view, we traced each complaint, each sigh of frustration, and the unverbalized assumptions behind opposing viewpoints, and they all… Read more »