Zarko Manojlovic

Dr. Manojlovic in an Assistant Professor in the department of Translational Genomics and the Director of the newly formed Keck Genomics Platform (KGP) at the Keck School of Medicine of University of Southern California. In 2017, with support of Keck Medicine led the creation of the state-of-the-art next generation sequencing center with emphasis on multi-disciplinary collaborative projects. KGP is a service platform designed to support Keck School of Medicine, greater USC, and its affiliates with a complete, high throughput next generation sequencing ecosystem that can support projects at all stages of development. KGP provides support in high quality sample processing, library constructions, and high throughput next generation sequencing of RNA, whole genome, exome, bi-sulfide, methylome, esoteric, and custom targeted assays by utilizing the Illumina platform such as MiSeq and NovaSeq. KGP also leverages high performance computational resources with in-house built pipelines and information management systems vital for a complete research-based precision medicine platform. KGP’s major mission is to build a collaborative environment and provide team-driven research support within the scope of the next generation technologies to ultimately drive advances in translational genomics and pave a way towards personalized medicine.

Dr. Manojlovic earned his Ph.D. from Florida State University College of Medicine with a focus on delineating clinically actionable fibro-proliferative mechanisms in liver fibrosis and developmental disorders linked to ciliopathies. He then went on to complete his postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Dr. John D.Carpten. Under Dr. Carpten’s mentorship and a fruitful opportunity of co-mentoring by Drs. Jeff Trent, Jonathan Keats, Winnie Liang, and David W. Craig, resulted in Dr. Manojlovic processing over 250Tbs of raw sequencing data on studies focusing on a wide spectrum of somatic landscapes across melanoma, prostate cancer, multiple myeloma as part of the large Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation Personalized Medicine CoMMpaSS study, colorectal cancer, pediatric sarcomas in collaboration with Dr. Troy A. McEachron and Children Hospital of Orange County, B-cell lymphoma, breast, kidney, prostate, and bladder cancers. He also worked on health disparities research and tumor population heterogeneity. In addition, Dr. Manojlovic helped build the laboratory component that is utilized to support the new Department of Translational Genomics and Keck Genomics Platform where he was promoted to an Assistant Professor of Translational Genomics and Director of Keck Genomics Platform.

In his role as an Assistant Professor, Dr. Manojlovic has a continued interest in urothelial carcinomas, with a focus on utilizing next generation sequencing and “omics” to elucidate population and tumor heterogeneity, as well as tumor microenvironments at the nexus of informatics and functional biologics with direct clinical implications. Dr. Manojlovic plans to expand profiling and comprehensive molecular analysis of the organ-confined elusive low-grade heterogeneous urothelial carcinomas that escape standard treatments and escalate into aggressive high-risk tumors with a high rate of mortality. Furthermore, building on his previous experiences with continuous collaborations, Dr. Manojlovic is interested in interrogating the ancestral effects on disease progression and outcomes in the urothelial tumors. His group provides opportunities in dual training in functional bioinformatics with emphasis on clinical biologics approaches. Dr. Manojlovic has a major focus on applications of high throughput genomics critical to elucidate the oncogenic transcriptomes and genomes to identify clinically targetable events under the umbrella of precision medicine.

• Magee, William
• Hammoudeh, Jeff
• Yen, Stephen
• Urata, Mark
• Lenz, Heinz-Josef
• Chai, Yang