Travis Wheeler Announced as Co-Investigator on NIH-funded Human Virome Program

Travis Wheeler, PhD, an associate professor at the R. Ken Coit College of Pharmacy, is a co-investigator on an awarded grant that is part of the NIH Common Fund Human Virome Program. The interdisciplinary team, including Jason McDermott, PhD, from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, combines the Lab’s strong capability in characterizing viral metagenome sequences with the university’s strengths in computational science. Together, they intend to improve the identification and characterization of viral sequences in the human microbiome, promoting human health.

The NIH Human Virome Program is a research cohort focused on characterizing and understanding the function of viruses in the human body that do not cause disease. Although much is known about clinical diseases and their associated viruses, the healthy human virome remains largely understudied. By developing tools, models, and methods to explore viruses, researchers associated with the program establish a greater understanding of the virome’s role in overall human health and well-being. Similar past studies on the human microbiome – a collection of microbes that live in and on humans – profoundly changed the understanding of the microbiome’s effect on human health. The Human Virome Project will now do the same for viruses.

This project represents a continuation of a long-standing collaboration between McDermott and Wheeler, and leverages their unique blend of experience in bioinformatics, algorithm design, and machine learning. In the early phases of the project, they will develop open-source computational tools to enhance understanding of the relationships between human-hosted bacteria and the viruses that interact with them. As the project gains momentum, they will gather input from the nationwide consortium of Human Virome Program colleagues to refine their priorities and project goals. In doing so, they aim to advance human health research on a large scale, tailoring their work to fit the needs of the entire scientific community.

For this project, Wheeler is joined by Jeremiah Gaiser (a PhD student in the School of Information), Clément Goubert (a Research Professor and bioinformatics expert), and Jack Roddy (a software scientist). “As a community, we’ve just started to understand the complicated interplay between bacteria living in our bodies and the viruses that coexist with them,” says Wheeler. “My group has spent years developing computational tools to understand viral-like aspects of the human genome, and we are excited to bring our experience to bear on the exploration of the viral parts of the human microbiome”.

Wheeler is a two-time UA alumnus, earning a Bachelors in Evolutionary Biology in 1995 and a PhD in Computer Science in 2009. He returned to Tucson in 2021 to join the College of Pharmacy faculty, where he now applies decades of research experience in designing algorithms, statistical models, and software for problems motivated by biological data. He leads a research group dedicated to computational genomics, drug discovery, and more. Visit his profile to learn more about his work and the Wheeler Lab.