Current Role:
Dr Bradford is currently Head of Bioinformatics at Almac Diagnostic Services, where his team focuses on developing and executing bioinformatics pipelines and tools to support NGS assays for both biomarker research and clinical trial use. The team’s particular expertise is in developing novel approaches that add value to standard in silico workflows, and address issues inherent in complex genomics datasets and challenging sample types.
Previous Experience:
Prior to joining Almac, James gained a BSc in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at University of Durham followed by MRes and PhD qualifications in Bioinformatics at University of Leeds. As a post-doctoral researcher at Cancer Research UK, he was involved in much of the early work on evaluating Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) against established technologies leading to publication of the first comparison of RNA-Seq with Exon Arrays. His involvement in NGS continued at AstraZeneca as Oncology NGS Informatics Lead with responsibility to deliver NGS bioinformatics pipelines and contribute to numerous aspects of early phase drug discovery including delivery of novel targets and biomarker hypotheses. James then moved to University of Sheffield as an independent researcher, with a specific research interest in functional characterisation of long non-coding RNAs as cancer biomarkers and novel therapeutic targets. He has now gained over 20 years of experience in applying bioinformatics in both pharmaceutical and academic environments.
Joined Almac:
2016
