Daniel King, Ph.D.

Daniel King, MD, PhD, is a former Howard Hughes research scholar at the National Institutes of Health and trained in genomics and bioinformatics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he developed software tools to perform mosaic copy number detection. During his time at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, he spearheaded copy number analysis for 36,000 exome samples in the Deciphering Developmental Disorder Rare Disease project. The results from this work characterized unprecedented detail in the landscape and architecture of developmental disorders, was published in Nature and Lancet, and led to several first author publications.
Following medical and graduate school, Dr. King pursued a medical oncology fellowship under the ABIM Research Track pathway at Stanford University. A core focus of his fellowship research involved circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), which included the computational design of a ctDNA detection panel for pancreas cancer and laboratory validation. This work extended to fragmentomics—a computational analysis of circulating DNA fragment ends as a biomarker of cancer for early detection. From here, Dr. King created a large biobank of pancreas cancer specimens consisting of nearly 500 clinical blood samples from approximately 250 patients. He went on to link this biobank with a large clinical research database built in pancreatic cancer to mine and associate clinical data with translational correlates.