Andrew Kossenkov

Andrew Kossenkov, Ph.D. serves as an Assistant Professor at The Wistar Institute, specifically within the Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center and the Genome Regulation and Cell Signaling Program of the Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center. His career trajectory began with bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science and bioinformatics from Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in Russia, followed by a Ph.D. in biomedical science from Drexel University in Philadelphia. He joined The Wistar Institute in 2007 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Showe lab and subsequently became managing director of the Bioinformatics Facility before his 2019 appointment as Assistant Professor.

Dr. Kossenkov's research focuses on applying computational approaches to analyze various kinds of biomedical high-throughput data, with particular expertise in interpreting results and visualizing complex datasets. His laboratory collaborates extensively with other Wistar labs on research projects spanning cancer, infectious diseases, and fundamental biological questions including regeneration, stem cell biology, mitochondrial proteins, transcriptional regulation, synapse biology, blood development, and global epigenetic gene silencing. The Kossenkov Laboratory relies heavily on bioinformatics analysis of drug screen results, next-generation sequencing data, and proteomics.

His publication record reveals a strong focus on cancer immunology, particularly ovarian cancer, melanoma, and breast cancer, with significant contributions to understanding how metabolic reprogramming, mitochondrial dynamics, and immune microenvironment interactions influence tumor progression and treatment response. His work often bridges computational biology with experimental validation through extensive collaborations across multiple institutions including Fox Chase Cancer Center, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, New York University, Weill Cornell, and Harvard.

Through his leadership of the Bioinformatics Facility, Dr. Kossenkov provides critical expertise for high-throughput data support, analysis, and annotation, developing database-oriented gene annotation pipelines and algorithms to visualize highly specific and intricate results. His laboratory offers flexible and customizable support for a wide range of experiments across multiple research domains, making significant contributions to both computational methodology development and biological discovery.