Wofford College graduate, Cody Watson, creates software to aid in breast cancer research

2015 Jul 15

In the world of cancer research, the name Cody Watson (a 2015 graduate of Wofford College) may not draw lots of attention, but the medical technology software he created last summer as a Papadopoulos Scholar has.

While interning with Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Watson wrote the code for PyMethyl, described on the Python Software Foundation website as "a quick and dirty way to find methylation patterns within the human genome." It's now been downloaded tens of thousands of times in labs around the globe.

According to Watson, the software serves as a pattern-matching algorithm between two known sets of human genomes, then looks for areas of hypermethylation to see how the expression of genes affects breast cancer.

"My algorithm found these different areas of expression between the two groups by doing a global-wide search for differences and then comparing the different areas of methlyation to the government database for genes," says Watson. "After this we then knew what specific genes were involved."

Watson says that the software can be used for comparing any type of data - methylation data, viral DNA, bacterial DNA, protein combining to the DNA as well as any other type of data that can be tagged on a human DNA or RNA sequence.

Watson, a biology and computer science double major with an emphasis in computational science and a minor in mathematics, gravitated toward computers after deciding early in his college career that he did not want to become a doctor. His internships in the field of computational science reinforced the decision. Now he is making plans to begin a Ph.D. program in computer science at the College of William & Mary in the fall. He received a full scholarship plus stipend. Eventually he sees himself working in either computer security or computational biology, including nanobot technology or neurobiology. Watson says that if he pursues computer security he could work for the NSA, FBI, CIA, etc., and if he pursues computational biology he will most likely work for a biotech company working in medical technology.

Watson is working in Wofford College's IT department prior to starting graduate school.