n2457769033_7548By day I am a bioinformatician who is interested in oncology and personalized medicine; a relatively new field that involves aspects of biology, medicine, statistics and information technology.

I enjoy clinically-driven research and working in multi-disciplinary groups. Currently I am working in the Molecular Profiling group at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in Tarrytown, NY.

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Peer-reviewed (Scientific) Publications

Whilst I don’t (yet) have a huge wealth of publications to my name, this Google Scholar link should show you some of the projects in which I have been involved.

Below is my personal bibliography to date, with links to the PubMed entry where possible:

  1. van Laar RK, Ma XJ, de Jong D, Wehkamp D, Floore AN, Warmoes MO, Simon I, Wang W, Erlander M, Van’t Veer LJ et al: Implementation of a novel microarray-based diagnostic test for cancer of unknown primary. Int J Cancer 2009, 125(6):1390-1397.
  2. Horlings, Hugo M., van Laar, Ryan K., Kerst, Jan-Martijn, Helgason, Helgi H., Wesseling, Jelle, van der Hoeven, Jacobus J.M., Warmoes, Marc O., Floore, Arno, Witteveen, Anke, Lahti-Domenici, Jaana, Glas, Annuska M., Van’t Veer, Laura J., de Jong, Daphne Gene Expression Profiling to Identify the Histogenetic Origin of Metastatic Adenocarcinomas of Unknown Primary J Clin Oncol 2008 26: 4435-4441
  3. Bridgewater J, van Laar R, Floore A, Van’t Veer L. (2008) Gene expression profiling may improve diagnosis in patients with carcinoma of unknown primary. Br J Cancer. 2008 Apr 22;98(8):1425-30.
  4. Kok M, Linn SC, Van Laar RK, Jansen MP, van den Berg TM, Delahaye LJ, Glas AM, Peterse JL, Hauptmann M, Foekens JA, Klijn JG, Wessels LF, Van’t Veer LJ, Berns EM (2008) Comparison of gene expression profiles predicting progression in breast cancer patients treated with tamoxifen. Breast Cancer Res Treat. 2008 Mar 4
  5. Glas, A.M., Knoops, L., Delahaye, L., Kersten, M.J., Kibbelaar, R.E., Wessels, L.A., van Laar, R., van Krieken, J.H., Baars, J.W., Raemaekers, J., et al. (2007). Gene-expression and immunohistochemical study of specific T-cell subsets and accessory cell types in the transformation and prognosis of follicular lymphoma. J Clin Oncol 25, 390-398.
  6. Ritchie, M.E., Diyagama, D., Neilson, J., van Laar, R., Dobrovic, A., Holloway, A., and Smyth, G.K. (2006). Empirical array quality weights in the analysis of microarray data. BMC Bioinformatics 7, 261.
  7. Eckhardt, B.L., Parker, B.S., van Laar, R.K., Restall, C.M., Natoli, A.L., Tavaria, M.D., Stanley, K.L., Sloan, E.K., Moseley, J.M., and Anderson, R.L. (2005). Genomic analysis of a spontaneous model of breast cancer metastasis to bone reveals a role for the extracellular matrix. Mol Cancer Res 3, 1-13.
  8. Peart, M.J., Smyth, G.K., van Laar, R.K., Bowtell, D.D., Richon, V.M., Marks, P.A., Holloway, A.J., and Johnstone, R.W. (2005). Identification and functional significance of genes regulated by structurally different histone deacetylase inhibitors. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 102, 3697-3702.
  9. Tothill, R.W., Kowalczyk, A., Rischin, D., Bousioutas, A., Haviv, I., van Laar, R.K., Waring, P.M., Zalcberg, J., Ward, R., Biankin, A.V., et al. (2005). An expression-based site of origin diagnostic method designed for clinical application to cancer of unknown origin. Cancer Res 65, 4031-4040.
  10. White, J.R., Boyd, V., Crameri, G.S., Duch, C.J., van Laar, R.K., Wang, L.F., and Eaton, B.T. (2005). Location of, immunogenicity of and relationships between neutralization epitopes on the attachment protein (G) of Hendra virus. The Journal of general virology 86, 2839-2848.
  11. Holloway, A.J., van Laar, R.K., Tothill, R.W., and Bowtell, D.D. (2002). Options available–from start to finish–for obtaining data from DNA microarrays II. Nat Genet 32 Suppl, 481-489.

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Conference posters

Below are a selection of the conference posters I have personally created and presented. Whist scientific posters have a fairly low return on the time/effort-investment that is required to produce them, I enjoy the graphic design aspect and having to condense a lot of science into a small(ish) space.

NB. These are large JPEG images; scroll to the bottom right hand corner to close.

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My Previous Life

oldsite

Once upon a time I had a very simple website (ryanvanlaar.id.au)  which looked something like this, and contained two main sections:

The idea was to showcase the research and web work I was doing in order to impress potential post-PhD employers. I’m not sure if it succeeded (actually, I guess it kind of did), but I would recommend anyone doing a PhD type project to consider doing something similar. In the very least, it forces you to take a ‘birds eye’ view of your progress and to consider how your research looks to an outsider – something far too many scientists overlook in my opinion.

PhD Thesis

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The final version of my PhD thesis, all 401 (slightly mind-numbing pages), is available  here in PDF glory, or click here to for the more official the Melbourne University ePrints repository.

I am mainly putting this online ‘complete’ this section and to allow for some closure on these 4yrs of my life. And maybe just because I am a little proud of it; besides the awful typography on the cover, that is.

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1.    van ‘t Veer LJ, Dai H, van de Vijver MJ, He YD, Hart AA, Mao M, Peterse HL, van der Kooy K, Marton MJ, Witteveen AT et al: Gene expression profiling predicts clinical outcome of breast cancer. Nature 2002, 415(6871):530-536.