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Vésteinn Thorsson, PhD

Principal Scientist

ISB

Dr. Thorsson aims to apply computational methods toward improving human health. His research encompasses mathematical modeling, gene regulatory networks, bioinformatics and data integration, cancer genomics and immunooncology. Dr. Thorsson has worked on systems modeling of gene regulatory networks in yeast and halobacterium, and on molecular networks responsible for the activation of murine macrophages. As part of the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Research Network, Dr. Thorsson played a key leadership and analysis role in all TCGA studies of gastrointestinal (GI) tumors – colorectal, gastric, and esophageal cancer, including in determining the molecular subtypes in GI cancer. Dr. Thorsson also served as a co-chair of a working group dedicated to comprehensive analysis of immune response in the more than 10,000 TCGA tumor samples, which culminated in the publication of the study “The Immune Landscape of Cancer”. Dr. Thorsson plays a lead role in the iAtlas portal for immunoncology, in the data coordinating center of the NCI Human Tumor Atlas Network, and on a project developing digital twins for acute myeloid leukemia.

PhD, Physics, Stony Brook University, 1992

Computational Biology, Immunooncology

Mo, C.-K., Liu, J., Chen, S., Storrs, E., Targino da Costa, A. L. N., Houston, A., Wendl, M. C., Jayasinghe, R. G., Iglesia, M. D., Ma, C., Herndon, J. M., Southard-Smith, A. N., Liu, X., Mudd, J., Karpova, A., Shinkle, A., Goedegebuure, S. P., Abdelzaher, A. T. M. A., Bo, P., … Ding, L. (2024). Tumour evolution and microenvironment interactions in 2D and 3D space. Nature, 634(8036), 1178–1186. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08087-4 Cite Download
Thorsson, V., Heimann, C., Lamb, A., Gibbs, D., Bortone, D., Dexheimer, S., Vensko, S., Chae, Y., Shmulevich, I., Vincent, B., & Eddy, J. (2022). 927 Streamlining cancer immunotherapy research with the CRI iAtlas data resource and web portal. Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, 10(Suppl 2). https://doi.org/10.1136/jitc-2022-SITC2022.0927 Cite Download
Sayaman, R. W., Saad, M., Heimann, C., Hu, D., Kunji, K., Roelands, J., Wolf, D. M., Huntsman, S., Ceccarelli, M., Thorsson, V., Ziv, E., & Bedognetti, D. (2022). Analytic pipelines to assess the relationship between immune response and germline genetics in human tumors. STAR Protocols, 3(4), 101809. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xpro.2022.101809 Cite Download
Bortone, D., Monette, A., Tschernia, N., Cogdill, A., Najjar, Y., Sweis, R. F., Valpione, S., Wennerberg, E., Bommareddy, P., Haymaker, C., Khan, U., McGee, H. M., Park, W., Sater, H. A., Spencer, C., Ascierto, M., Barsan, V., Popat, V., Wells, D., … Vincent, B. (2022). 508 Generalizability of predictive versus prognostic indicators from published transcriptomic associations with tumor response to immune checkpoint inhibition. Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, 10(Suppl 2). https://doi.org/10.1136/jitc-2022-SITC2022.0508 Cite Download
Mok, L., Orlando, A., Lehrer, J., Stuart, J., Rudqvist, N.-P., Vincent, B., Monette, A., Senbabaoglu, Y., Smith, K., Thomas, P., Tschernia, N., Thorsson, V., Zappasodi, R., & Jonsson, V. (2022). 9 A pan-cancer multi-omic immune single-cell atlas for cancer immunotherapy: focus on CD4+ T cells. Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, 10(Suppl 2). https://doi.org/10.1136/jitc-2022-SITC2022.0009 Cite Download
Taylor, A. J., Nikolov, M., de Brujin, I., Muhlich, J., De Felice, M., Sokolov, A., Schapiro, D., Sorger, P., Bletz, J., Schultz, N., Thorsson, V., Eddy, J., & Cerami, E. (2022). Abstract 2131: Curating cartography: Enabling the harmonisation, visualisation, and reuse of diverse multiplexed imaging data through the Human Tumor Atlas Network Data Coordinating Center. Cancer Research, 82(12_Supplement), 2131. https://doi.org/10.1158/1538-7445.AM2022-2131 Cite
Middha, P., Sayaman, R. W., Saad, M., Thorsson, V., Bedognetti, D., & Ziv, E. (2022). Multi-tissue Transcriptome-wide Association Study Identifies 12 Novel Candidate Genes Associated with the Immune Traits in Cancer. GENETIC EPIDEMIOLOGY, 46, 518–518. Cite
Sherif, S., Roelands, J., Mifsud, W., Ahmed, E. I., Raynaud, C. M., Rinchai, D., Sathappan, A., Maaz, A., Saleh, A., Ozer, E., Fakhro, K. A., Mifsud, B., Thorsson, V., Bedognetti, D., & Hendrickx, W. R. L. (2022). The immune landscape of solid pediatric tumors. Journal of Experimental & Clinical Cancer Research: CR, 41(1), 199. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13046-022-02397-z Cite
Schapiro, D., Yapp, C., Sokolov, A., Reynolds, S. M., Chen, Y.-A., Sudar, D., Xie, Y., Muhlich, J., Arias-Camison, R., Arena, S., Taylor, A. J., Nikolov, M., Tyler, M., Lin, J.-R., Burlingame, E. A., Chang, Y. H., Farhi, S. L., Thorsson, V., Venkatamohan, N., … Sorger, P. K. (2022). MITI minimum information guidelines for highly multiplexed tissue images. Nature Methods, 19(3), 262–267. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-022-01415-4 Cite Download
Gibbs, D. L., Aguilar, B., Thorsson, V., Ratushny, A. V., & Shmulevich, I. (2021). Patient-Specific Cell Communication Networks Associate With Disease Progression in Cancer. Frontiers in Genetics, 12, 667382. https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2021.667382 Cite Download
Sayaman, R. W., Saad, M., Thorsson, V., Hu, D., Hendrickx, W., Roelands, J., Porta-Pardo, E., Mokrab, Y., Farshidfar, F., Kirchhoff, T., Sweis, R. F., Bathe, O. F., Heimann, C., Campbell, M. J., Stretch, C., Huntsman, S., Graff, R. E., Syed, N., Radvanyi, L., … Bedognetti, D. (2021). Germline genetic contribution to the immune landscape of cancer. Immunity, 54(2), 367-386.e8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.immuni.2021.01.011 Cite Download
Eddy, J. A., Thorsson, V., Lamb, A. E., Gibbs, D. L., Heimann, C., Yu, J. X., Chung, V., Chae, Y., Dang, K., Vincent, B. G., Shmulevich, I., & Guinney, J. (2020). CRI iAtlas: an interactive portal for immuno-oncology research. F1000Research, 9, 1028. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.25141.1 Cite Download
Cesano, A., Cannarile, M. A., Gnjatic, S., Gomes, B., Guinney, J., Karanikas, V., Karkada, M., Kirkwood, J. M., Kotlan, B., Masucci, G. V., Meeusen, E., Monette, A., Naing, A., Thorsson, V., Tschernia, N., Wang, E., Wells, D. K., Wyant, T. L., & Rutella, S. (2020). Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer clinical and biomarkers data sharing resource document: Volume II-practical challenges. Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1136/jitc-2020-001472 Cite Download
Rutella, S., Cannarile, M. A., Gnjatic, S., Gomes, B., Guinney, J., Karanikas, V., Karkada, M., Kirkwood, J. M., Kotlan, B., Masucci, G. V., Meeusen, E., Monette, A., Naing, A., Thorsson, V., Tschernia, N., Wang, E., Wells, D. K., Wyant, T. L., & Cesano, A. (2020). Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer clinical and biomarkers data sharing resource document: Volume I-conceptual challenges. Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1136/jitc-2020-001389 Cite Download
Derks, S., de Klerk, L. K., Xu, X., Fleitas, T., Liu, K. X., Liu, Y., Dietlein, F., Margolis, C., Chiaravalli, A. M., Da Silva, A. C., Ogino, S., Akarca, F. G., Freeman, G. J., Rodig, S. J., Hornick, J. L., van Allen, E., Li, B., Liu, S. X., Thorsson, V., & Bass, A. J. (2020). Characterizing diversity in the tumor-immune microenvironment of distinct subclasses of gastroesophageal adenocarcinomas. Annals of Oncology: Official Journal of the European Society for Medical Oncology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annonc.2020.04.011 Cite
Thorsson, V. (2020). Multiplatform Integrative Analysis of Immunogenomic Data for Biomarker Discovery. Methods in Molecular Biology (Clifton, N.J.), 2055, 679–698. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-9773-2_30 Cite
Thorsson, V. (2019). Multiplatform Integrative Analysis of Immunogenomic Data for Biomarker Discovery. Methods in Molecular Biology (Clifton, N.J.), 2055, 679–698. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-9773-2_30 Cite
Möller, K., Sigurbjornsdottir, S., Arnthorsson, A. O., Pogenberg, V., Dilshat, R., Fock, V., Brynjolfsdottir, S. H., Bindesboll, C., Bessadottir, M., Ogmundsdottir, H. M., Simonsen, A., Larue, L., Wilmanns, M., Thorsson, V., Steingrimsson, E., & Ogmundsdottir, M. H. (2019). MITF has a central role in regulating starvation-induced autophagy in melanoma. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 1055. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-37522-6 Cite
Hoadley, K. A., Yau, C., Hinoue, T., Wolf, D. M., Lazar, A. J., Drill, E., Shen, R., Taylor, A. M., Cherniack, A. D., Thorsson, V., Akbani, R., Bowlby, R., Wong, C. K., Wiznerowicz, M., Sanchez-Vega, F., Robertson, A. G., Schneider, B. G., Lawrence, M. S., Noushmehr, H., … Laird, P. W. (2018). Cell-of-Origin Patterns Dominate the Molecular Classification of 10,000 Tumors from 33 Types of Cancer. Cell, 173(2), 291-304.e6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.03.022 Cite Download
Liu, J., Lichtenberg, T., Hoadley, K. A., Poisson, L. M., Lazar, A. J., Cherniack, A. D., Kovatich, A. J., Benz, C. C., Levine, D. A., Lee, A. V., Omberg, L., Wolf, D. M., Shriver, C. D., Thorsson, V., & Hu, H. (2018). An Integrated TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource to Drive High-Quality Survival Outcome Analytics. Cell, 173(2), 400-416.e11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.02.052 Cite Download
Thorsson, V., Gibbs, D. L., Brown, S. D., Wolf, D., Bortone, D. S., Ou Yang, T.-H., Porta-Pardo, E., Gao, G. F., Plaisier, C. L., Eddy, J. A., Ziv, E., Culhane, A. C., Paull, E. O., Sivakumar, I. K. A., Gentles, A. J., Malhotra, R., Farshidfar, F., Colaprico, A., Parker, J. S., … Shmulevich, I. (2018). The Immune Landscape of Cancer. Immunity, 48(4), 812-830.e14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.immuni.2018.03.023 Cite Download
Hmeljak, J., Sanchez-Vega, F., Hoadley, K. A., Shih, J., Stewart, C., Heiman, D., Tarpey, P., Danilova, L., Drill, E., Gibb, E. A., Bowlby, R., Kanchi, R., Osmanbeyoglu, H. U., Sekido, Y., Takeshita, J., Newton, Y., Graim, K., Gupta, M., Gay, C. M., … TCGA Research Network. (2018). Integrative Molecular Characterization of Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma. Cancer Discovery. https://doi.org/10.1158/2159-8290.CD-18-0804 Cite
Shen, H., Shih, J., Hollern, D. P., Wang, L., Bowlby, R., Tickoo, S. K., Thorsson, V., Mungall, A. J., Newton, Y., Hegde, A. M., Armenia, J., Sánchez-Vega, F., Pluta, J., Pyle, L. C., Mehra, R., Reuter, V. E., Godoy, G., Jones, J., Shelley, C. S., … Hoadley, K. A. (2018). Integrated Molecular Characterization of Testicular Germ Cell Tumors. Cell Reports, 23(11), 3392–3406. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2018.05.039 Cite Download
Saltz, J., Gupta, R., Hou, L., Kurc, T., Singh, P., Nguyen, V., Samaras, D., Shroyer, K. R., Zhao, T., Batiste, R., Arnam, J. V., Caesar-Johnson, S. J., Demchok, J. A., Felau, I., Kasapi, M., Ferguson, M. L., Hutter, C. M., Sofia, H. J., Tarnuzzer, R., … Thorsson, V. (2018). Spatial Organization and Molecular Correlation of Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes Using Deep Learning on Pathology Images. Cell Reports, 23(1), 181-193.e7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2018.03.086 Cite Download
Liu, Y., Sethi, N. S., Hinoue, T., Schneider, B. G., Cherniack, A. D., Sanchez-Vega, F., Seoane, J. A., Farshidfar, F., Bowlby, R., Islam, M., Kim, J., Chatila, W., Akbani, R., Kanchi, R. S., Rabkin, C. S., Willis, J. E., Wang, K. K., McCall, S. J., Mishra, L., … Laird, P. W. (2018). Comparative Molecular Analysis of Gastrointestinal Adenocarcinomas. Cancer Cell, 33(4), 721-735.e8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccell.2018.03.010 Cite
Ding, L., Bailey, M. H., Porta-Pardo, E., Thorsson, V., Colaprico, A., Bertrand, D., Gibbs, D. L., Weerasinghe, A., Huang, K.-L., Tokheim, C., Cortés-Ciriano, I., Jayasinghe, R., Chen, F., Yu, L., Sun, S., Olsen, C., Kim, J., Taylor, A. M., Cherniack, A. D., … Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network. (2018). Perspective on Oncogenic Processes at the End of the Beginning of Cancer Genomics. Cell, 173(2), 305-320.e10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.03.033 Cite
Wang, Z., McGlynn, K. A., Rajpert-De Meyts, E., Bishop, D. T., Chung, C. C., Dalgaard, M. D., Greene, M. H., Gupta, R., Grotmol, T., Haugen, T. B., Karlsson, R., Litchfield, K., Mitra, N., Nielsen, K., Pyle, L. C., Schwartz, S. M., Thorsson, V., Vardhanabhuti, S., Wiklund, F., … Testicular Cancer Consortium. (2017). Meta-analysis of five genome-wide association studies identifies multiple new loci associated with testicular germ cell tumor. Nature Genetics, 49(7), 1141–1147. https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3879 Cite
Kytola, V., Topaloglu, U., Miller, L. D., Bitting, R. L., Goodman, M. M., D Agostino, R. B., Desnoyers, R. J., Albright, C., Yacoub, G., Qasem, S. A., DeYoung, B., Thorsson, V., Shmulevich, I., Yang, M., Shcherban, A., Pagni, M., Liu, L., Nykter, M., Chen, K., … Zhang, W. (2017). Mutational Landscapes of Smoking-Related Cancers in Caucasians and African Americans: Precision Oncology Perspectives at Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center. Theranostics, 7(11), 2914–2923. https://doi.org/10.7150/thno.20355 Cite
Camargo, M. C., Bowlby, R., Chu, A., Pedamallu, C. S., Thorsson, V., Elmore, S., Mungall, A. J., Bass, A. J., Gulley, M. L., & Rabkin, C. S. (2016). Validation and calibration of next-generation sequencing to identify Epstein-Barr virus-positive gastric cancer in The Cancer Genome Atlas. Gastric Cancer: Official Journal of the International Gastric Cancer Association and the Japanese Gastric Cancer Association, 19(2), 676–681. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10120-015-0508-x Cite Download
Bernard, B., Thorsson, V., Rovira, H., & Shmulevich, I. (2012). Increasing Coverage of Transcription Factor Position Weight Matrices through Domain-level Homology. PloS One, 7(8), e42779. Cite
Nykter, M., Lahdesmaki, H., Rust, A., Thorsson, V., & Shmulevich, I. (2009). A data integration framework for prediction of transcription factor targets. Ann N Y Acad Sci, 1158, 205–214. Cite
Thuong, N. T., Dunstan, S. J., Chau, T. T., Thorsson, V., Simmons, C. P., Quyen, N. T., Thwaites, G. E., Thi Ngoc Lan, N., Hibberd, M., Teo, Y. Y., Seielstad, M., Aderem, A., Farrar, J. J., & Hawn, T. R. (2008). Identification of tuberculosis susceptibility genes with human macrophage gene expression profiles. PLoS Pathog, 4(12), e1000229. Cite
Ramsey, S. A., Klemm, S. L., Zak, D. E., Kennedy, K. A., Thorsson, V., Li, B., Gilchrist, M., Gold, E. S., Johnson, C. D., Litvak, V., Navarro, G., Roach, J., Rosenberger, C. M., Rust, A. G., Yudkovsky, N., Aderem, A., & Shmulevich, I. (2008). Uncovering a macrophage transcriptional program by integrating evidence from motif scanning and expression dynamics. PLoS Comput Biol, 4(3), e1000021. Cite
Carter, G. W., Thorsson, V., & Galitski, T. (2008). Integrated Network Modeling of Molecular and Genetic Interactions. In Sourcebook of Models for Biomedical Research (pp. 67–74). Humana Press. Cite
Korb, M., Rust, A. G., Thorsson, V., Battail, C., Li, B., Hwang, D., Kennedy, K. A., Roach, J., Rosenberger, C. M., Gilchrist, M., Zak, D., Johnson, C., Marzolf, B., Aderem, A., Shmulevich, I., & Bolouri, H. (2008). The Innate Immune Database (IIDB). BMC Immunol, 9, 7. Cite
Bonneau, R., Facciotti, M. T., Reiss, D. J., Schmid, A. K., Pan, M., Kaur, A., Thorsson, V., Shannon, P., Johnson, M. H., Bare, J. C., Longabaugh, W., Vuthoori, M., Whitehead, K., Madar, A., Suzuki, L., Mori, T., Chang, D. E., DiRuggiero, J., Johnson, C. H., … Baliga, N. S. (2007). A predictive model for transcriptional control of physiology in a free living cell. Cell, 131(7), 1354–1365. Cite
Carter, G. W., Prinz, S., Neou, C., Shelby, J. P., Marzolf, B., Thorsson, V., & Galitski, T. (2007). Prediction of phenotype and gene expression for combinations of mutations. Mol Syst Biol, 3, 96. Cite
Gilchrist, M., Thorsson, V., Li, B., Rust, A. G., Korb, M., Roach, J., Kennedy, K., Hai, T., Bolouri, H., & Aderem, A. (2006). Systems biology approaches identify ATF3 as a negative regulator of Toll-like receptor 4. Nature, 441(7090), 173–178. Cite
Bonneau, R., Reiss, D. J., Shannon, P., Facciotti, M., Hood, L., Baliga, N. S., & Thorsson, V. (2006). The Inferelator: an algorithm for learning parsimonious regulatory networks from systems-biology data sets de novo. Genome Biol, 7(5), R36. Cite
Ramsey, S., Ozinsky, A., Clark, A., Smith, K. D., de Atauri, P., Thorsson, V., Orrell, D., & Bolouri, H. (2006). Transcriptional noise and cellular heterogeneity in mammalian macrophages. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 361(1467), 495–506. Cite
Thorsson, V., Hornquist, M., Siegel, A. F., & Hood, L. (2005). Reverse engineering galactose regulation in yeast through model selection. Stat Appl Genet Mol Biol, 4, Article28. Cite
Reiss, D. J., Avila-Campillo, I., Thorsson, V., Schwikowski, B., & Galitski, T. (2005). Tools enabling the elucidation of molecular pathways active in human disease: application to Hepatitis C virus infection. BMC Bioinformatics, 6, 154. Cite
Drees, B. L., Thorsson, V., Carter, G. W., Rives, A. W., Raymond, M. Z., Avila-Campillo, I., Shannon, P., & Galitski, T. (2005). Derivation of genetic interaction networks from quantitative phenotype data. Genome Biol, 6(4), R38. Cite
Tian, Q., Stepaniants, S. B., Mao, M., Weng, L., Feetham, M. C., Doyle, M. J., Yi, E. C., Dai, H., Thorsson, V., Eng, J., Goodlett, D., Berger, J. P., Gunter, B., Linseley, P. S., Stoughton, R. B., Aebersold, R., Collins, S. J., Hanlon, W. A., & Hood, L. E. (2004). Integrated genomic and proteomic analyses of gene expression in Mammalian cells. Mol Cell Proteomics, 3(10), 960–969. Cite
Smith, K. D., & Thorsson, V. (2004). Exploring Toll-Like Receptor Regulation of Innate Immunity with the Tools of Systems Biology. Current Genomics, 5(7), 545–557. Cite
Yoo, C., Thorsson, V., & Cooper, G. F. (2002). Discovery of causal relationships in a gene-regulation pathway from a mixture of experimental and observational DNA microarray data. Pac Symp Biocomput, 498–509. Cite
Ideker, T., Thorsson, V., Ranish, J., Christmas, R., Buhler, J., Eng, J. K., Bumgarner, R., Goodlett, D. R., Aebersold, R., & Hood, L. (2001). Integrated genomic and proteomic analyses of a systematically perturbed metabolic network. Science, 292(5518), 929–934. Cite
Ng, W. V., Kennedy, S. P., Mahairas, G. G., Berquist, B., Pan, M., Shukla, H. D., Lasky, S. R., Baliga, N. S., Thorsson, V., Sbrogna, J., Swartzell, S., Weir, D., Hall, J., Dahl, T. A., Welti, R., Goo, Y. A., Leithauser, B., Keller, K., Cruz, R., … DasSarma, S. (2000). Genome sequence of Halobacterium species NRC-1. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 97(22), 12176–12181. Cite