Melissa Suzanne Cline is an American biologist. She is an Associate Research Scientist at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics InstituteBetween June 2001 and December 2004 she was a staff scientist at Affymetrix, Inc. in Emeryville, California where she was involved in developing ANOSVA, a "statistical method to identify alternative spicing from expression data," during which she "analyzed the effects of alternative splicing on protein transmembrane and signal peptide regions".[1] Subsequently, she moved to UC Santa Cruz, where she wrote on genome browsing.[2] According to the Thomson Reuters report, she was one of the most highly cited scientists in the world in 2012/13.[3]
Cline is currently the program manager for the BRCA Exchange, a platform that shares knowledge on the tens of thousands of BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 genetic variants that could influence a person's susceptibility to breast cancer, particularly on the clinical significance of those variants.[4] One of the challenge in curating the clinical impact of genetic variants is that is the curation often relies on clinical evidence of the variants in patients and their families; to protect patient privacy, most genetic data is siloed, or maintained in closed databases where the data are inaccessible to most researchers.[5] Addressing this problem, Dr. Cline and colleagues devised a "federated analysis" approach to analyze patient data within its secure home repository, gathering new knowledge for variant curation while safeguarding patient privacy.[6] [7] This approach has successfully gathered new variant knowledge from siloed data, advancing the curation of BRCA variants.[8] [9]