Isaac Kohane

About

Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and the Marion V. Nelson Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. He developed and applies computational techniques to address disease at multiple scales, including healthcare systems as 'living laboratories' and the functional genomics of neurodevelopment with a focus on autism. Over the last 30 years, Kohane's research has been driven by the vision of transforming biomedical data into knowledge and translating that knowledge into practice to find new cures, improve diagnoses, and deliver optimal care. He has designed and led multiple internationally adopted efforts to instrument the healthcare enterprise for discovery and to enable innovative decision-making tools at the point of care. His work on 'omic-scale molecular analyses' has contributed to re-characterizing and reclassifying diseases such as autism, rheumatoid arthritis, and cancers, often utilizing developmental trajectories of genes to unravel complex diseases. Kohane earned his MD/PhD from Boston University in 1987, completed post-doctoral work at Boston Children’s Hospital, and has been a faculty member at Harvard Medical School since 1992. He served as Director of Countway Library and Co-Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics before it became the Department of Biomedical Informatics in 2015. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the American Society for Clinical Investigation,…

Research topics

• Medicine
• Biology
• Genetics
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Internal medicine
• Psychiatry
• Artificial Intelligence
• Political Science
• Nursing

Selected publications

• Safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Setting

  New England Journal of Medicine · 2021-08-25 · 1051 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: Preapproval trials showed that messenger RNA (mRNA)-based vaccines against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) had a good safety profile, yet these trials were subject to size and patient-mix limitations. An evaluation of the safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine with respect to a broad range of potential adverse events is needed. METHODS: We used data from the largest health care organization in Israel to evaluate the safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine. For e…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Effectiveness of a third dose of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine for preventing severe outcomes in Israel: an observational study

  The Lancet · 2021-10-29 · 941 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dissecting the Shared Genetic Architecture of Suicide Attempt, Psychiatric Disorders, and Known Risk Factors

  Biological Psychiatry · 2021 · 240 citations

  DOI

• Genome-wide gene-environment analyses of major depressive disorder and reported lifetime traumatic experiences in UK Biobank

  Molecular Psychiatry · 2020 · 219 citations

  ). Our results suggest that the genetic contribution to MDD is greater when reported trauma is present, and that a complex relationship exists between reported trauma exposure, body composition, and MDD.

  DOI

• A Comparison of Ten Polygenic Score Methods for Psychiatric Disorders Applied Across Multiple Cohorts

  Biological Psychiatry · 2021 · 202 citations

  BACKGROUND: Polygenic scores (PGSs), which assess the genetic risk of individuals for a disease, are calculated as a weighted count of risk alleles identified in genome-wide association studies. PGS methods differ in which DNA variants are included and the weights assigned to them; some require an independent tuning sample to help inform these choices. PGSs are evaluated in independent target cohorts with known disease status. Variability between target cohorts is observed in applications to rea…

  DOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01LM010125

  NIH · $1.2M · 2012

• NIH Grant U54HL117798

  NIH · $36.7M · 2018

• The Integration of Trans-omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMED) and Other Heart, Lung, Blood and Sleep (HLBS) Data Sets with the Data Commons

  NIH · $8.8M · 2017–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Shawn N. Murphy

  357 shared

• Kenneth D. Mandl

  Harvard University

  231 shared

• Tianxi Cai

  Harvard University

  226 shared

• Nathan Palmer

  220 shared

• Katherine P. Liao

  Harvard University

  200 shared

• Susanne Churchill

  Harvard University

  187 shared

• Griffin M. Weber

  179 shared

• Stanley Y. Shaw

  166 shared

Labs

• ZaklabPI

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