Biography: Amos

School of Medicine

Email: CIAmos@salud.unm.edu 
 

Areas of Expertise

Dr. Amos’ expertise is recognized nationally and internationally. He became the President of the International Genetic Epidemiology Society in 2002, and served as its Secretary/Treasurer from 2007 to 2012. He served on the board of external scientific advisors for the Centre Etude Polymorphism Humain from 2007-2014. He was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012. He served on the Board of Scientific Counselors (BSC) for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences from 2015-2021 and currently serves on the BSC for the National Human Genome Research Institute. Dr. Amos completed a term as reviewer for the Access Committee for the Center for Inherited Disease Research from 2007-2011. He received the AACR/ACS award for Excellence in Cancer Prevention 2020. He has also served as a reviewer for NIH, Cancer Research UK, and Canadian Institute for Health Research and numerous other panels. He has served or is serving as an associate editor for the American Journal of Human Genetics, Genes and Immunity, Genetic Epidemiology and Human and Molecular Genetics, Cancer Biomarkers and as a statistical editor for the Journal of the National Cancer Institute

 

Primary Research

Dr. Amos is leading the Data Science Initiative for the Health Science Center at UNM. The Initiative has developed a NIST 800-171 compliant computing environment that supports high performance computing for secured data. We are also in the process of standing up a new master’s training program in Health Informatics and Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Amos is also the Associate Director for Cancer Prevention and Data Science at the University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center. Prior to moving to UNM, Dr. Amos was the founder of the Center for Translational and Precision Health, which united research support at the Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Houston under a new Clinical and Translational Science Award. He also developed the first Department of Biomedical Data Science at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and developed a new Master’s program in Biomedical Data Science while leading that Department.

Dr. Amos has focused much of his career on developing and implementing methods for understanding the genetic and environmental influences underlying the etiology of common cancers and autoimmune diseases. He has authored or coauthored more than 800 peer reviewed papers, 20 reviews or book chapters, 2 books and has an H index of 148 with over 90,000 citations. He has developed and applied novel bioinformatical approaches for identifying genetic and environmental factors influencing lung, colon and brain cancer development. Starting in 2008, he has led large genetic studies that identified common variants influencing lung cancer development, including variants in CHRNA5 that have substantial impact on both lung cancer risk and smoking behavior, making it more difficult for smokers to quit. Because individuals carrying one or two copies of this variant become more heavily nicotine dependent and are at higher risk for lung cancer, we have subsequently studied using a genetically informed precision medicine approach to smoking cessation management. Results from a recent clinical trial (PMID: 32602170) showed that patients with higher risk genotypes benefitted from pharmacological support during smoking cessation but low risk individuals did not. This finding indicates that a targeted approach to smoking cessation based on genetic information is efficacious

Dr. Amos led the OncoArray Consortium that completed genotyping of about 500,000 individuals using a customized array developed with Illumina that comprises 500,000 markers (PMID: 27697780). It was developed to decipher the genetic architecture of common cancers including prostate, colon, breast and ovarian cancers. We identified a novel variant of ATM (L2307F, rs56009889, PMID: 32393777) that occurs most frequently in Ashkenazi populations and confers a 7 fold elevated risk for developing lung cancer among female never smokers. He is the communicating PI of the Integrative Analysis of Lung Cancer Risk and Etiology – Translation and Integration – U19CA203654, which identifies genetic, protein, clinical and radiomic predictors of increased risk for the development of lung cancer or its progression. We are capitalizing on over a decade of international collaborations that have yielded genotype data on over 100,000 individuals to assess lung cancer risk for project 1, similarly large studies of participants in cohort studies to identify protein biomarkers of preclinical lung cancer development and screening studies across North American and Europe that we use to evaluate predictors of lung cancer development related to lung CT screening. We are translating these findings for clinical application by studying the use of genetic and protein biomarkers to improve the yield of recruitment for screening and improvement of smoking cessation processes. He is also a multiple PI studying risk factors influencing serrated polyp development that uses data from virtually all individuals receiving colonoscopies in New Hampshire (R01CA250542) and serves as a multiple PI for a grant identifying genetic factors influencing the risk for developing cholangiocarcinoma (R01CA275065).