Anthony Underwood

Director of Bioinformatics

Anthony
Underwood

NGS pipelines & breakome analysis at Broken String Biosciences. Genomic surveillance, CRISPR safety, and scalable bioinformatics infrastructure.

// GitHub // LinkedIn // Google Scholar // X / @bioinformAnt
About

I'm a strategic leader in bioinformatics and computational biology with over two decades of experience building scalable NGS pipelines, deploying global genomic surveillance infrastructure, and directing teams at the intersection of biology, software, and clinical need.

At Broken String Biosciences I lead bioinformatics for the INDUCE-seq® platform — PCR-free, cell-based detection of DNA double-strand breaks across the whole genome. The work sits at the regulatory frontier of cell and gene therapy safety.

Before that: genomic surveillance at scale during SARS-CoV-2, antimicrobial resistance tooling across four continents, and 15 years developing pathogen WGS pipelines at Public Health England.

Core skills

NGS Pipelines Nextflow DSL2 CRISPR Safety INDUCE-seq Python Rust Cloud Infrastructure Deep Learning Genomic Surveillance R Docker / Singularity GRCh38
Featured Post
★ FEATURED
NGS INDUCE-seq Genomics

INDUCE-seq: A PCR-Free Window into the Genome's Break Landscape

An overview of INDUCE-seq, how it avoids amplification bias, and why PCR-free DSB detection changes what we can see in the breakome.

· 7 min READ →
Recent Posts
ALL POSTS →
Surveillance NGS Infrastructure

Genomic Surveillance at Scale: Lessons from the COVID-19 Response

What building global pathogen surveillance infrastructure during SARS-CoV-2 taught me about reproducible pipelines, data federation, and scientific communication under pressure.

· 10 min READ →
CRISPR Genomics AMR

Thinking About CRISPR Off-Target Risk in a Clinical Context

How to frame off-target assessment for gene therapy applications — frequency, location, functional consequence, and the questions regulators actually ask.

· 8 min READ →
Nextflow NGS Infrastructure

Nextflow DSL2 Patterns I Actually Use

Practical patterns for scalable NGS pipelines in Nextflow DSL2 — module composition, subworkflows, and config layering for multi-environment deployments.

· 9 min READ →
Career

Director of Bioinformatics

Broken String Biosciences

Jul 2025 – Present

Head of Bioinformatics

Broken String Biosciences

Apr 2022 – Oct 2025

Head of Translational & Operational Bioinformatics

Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance

Oct 2021 – Apr 2022

Bioinformatics Implementation Manager

Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance

Jul 2018 – Oct 2021

Lead Computational Scientist

Inivata

Nov 2017 – Jul 2018

Lead for Bioinformatics

Public Health England

Apr 2002 – Nov 2017

Postdoctoral Researcher

Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

Aug 1995 – Mar 2002