About

My name is Tibor Gyuris. I am a biologist, a genomic scientist and what I do is always around next generation DNA sequencing.

All in my biologist career I was trying to learn and apply the front line scientific technologies, starting with monoclonal antibodies in the early 80-ies. In 1983, I presented in our journal club meeting about the future of cancer treatment, I found an article describing the magic bullet, ricin toxin coupled to a tumor antigen specific monoclonal antibody targeting exclusively cancer cells.  Very soon I was able to clone monoclonal antibodies.

My next futuristic scientific experiment was not long after that in the early 90-ies when I took a huge piece of DNA in my hand and run it on a pulse field gel like I was walking in the forest with a long ladder horizontally laid in may arms. This was the time when I plunged into the field of genomics. That was the stone age, however, the pre-sequence era. Every day we discovered a new gene.

Before the turn of the new millennium I listened to a presentation describing the future of medicine when an individual receives medical treatment based on individual genome sequence. The speaker called it personalized medicine. I understood that the first genome sequence is just the entry point to the personalized medicine and I realized that the task would be very difficult, since the first genome sequencing took 13 years and 400 million dollars to spend in brilliant academic and industrial laboratories. In order to personalize medical treatment everybody needs to be sequenced. Then my fascination with the greatest sci-fi literature and my fascination with a modest vision of a cancer killing magic bullet got dwarfed. All I wanted to do was genome sequencing.

In 2005 I had the choice in my beloved alma mater company to change my job within the company. I heard about a group that was sequencing cancer genes in order to associate them with cancer disease and predict the outcome of the medical treatment under development. That is how I entered into the middle age of sequencing by primitive machines and looking at the sequencing results by eyes on the computer screen.

By 2009 a new passion of my life has emanated, called next generation DNA sequencing.  Since then, what I have been doing is beyond reality, all imagination. By the summer of 2013 I did genotyping of my own DNA and I woke up to reality. I have just arrived in the future, here we are all. This future is called personalized genomics, when we all really sequence ourselves. We are now in the era when sequencing is available, chip based genotyping is more than available, it is actually cheap. So, what we need to do right now is to generate crowd-knowledge to understand our genes in order to better understand ourselves and if we need help to be treated for diseases that will be through genome based personalized medicine. My contribution to this ambitious goal is to open my EpiGeneBook to read our own genomes together.