Cory Abate-Shen, PhD

Cory Abate-Shen , PhD, who is known for her leading work in the development of innovative mouse models for translational research in prostate and bladder cancers, has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) . The AAAS is honoring Dr. Abate-Shen for her work in mouse models to better understand how basic cellular mechanisms are co-opted in cancer and for her contributions to the field of cancer biology. 

She joins a class of 416 new fellows, including two additional Columbia University faculty members, Drs. Richard Axel and Upmanu Lall, who also were elected today to the prestigious group. 

Dr. Abate-Shen, the Michael and Stella Chernow Professor of Urologic Sciences at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) , holds joint appointments in the Departments of Systems Biology , Medicine and Pathology & Cell Biology , and is a member and former interim director of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC) . An internationally recognized leader in genitourinary malignancies, Dr. Abate-Shen is particularly interested in advancing our understanding of the mechanisms and modeling of prostate and bladder tumors. An innovator in the generation of novel mouse models for these cancers, her work has led to the discovery of new biomarkers for early detection, as well as key advances in cancer prevention and treatment. Dr. Abate-Shen has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Sinsheimer Scholar Award, an NSF Young Investigator Award, a Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network Innovator Award and the Women in Cell Biology Junior Award from the American Society for Cell Biology. Currently, she is an American Cancer Society Research Professor, the first to be awarded at CUIMC. 

A research team from Columbia University Irving Medical Center has received a 2018 PCF Challenge Award from the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) to advance prostate cancer research. The interdisciplinary team at Columbia includes leading experts in systems biology, cancer research and medicine from Columbia’s Department of Systems Biology and the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC). 

Announced today, PCF is awarding more than $5.5 million in funding to a total of six teams to conduct research with the highest potential for accelerating new and improved treatments for advanced prostate cancer. PCF is one of the largest non-governmental organizations dedicated solely to funding prostate cancer research, and its annual Challenge Awards are highly coveted in the scientific and medical fields. 

In the United States, prostate cancer is the most common non-skin cancer, and 1 out of every 9 men in the U.S. will be diagnosed with the disease in his lifetime. To date, treatment of the most aggressive forms of prostate cancer represents a clinical challenge. After treatment failure with anti-androgen drugs, which are part of the standard of care for advanced metastatic prostate cancer, only few current therapeutic options remain and the impact on patient survival is limited. Indeed, the field needs major innovative, out-of-the-box approaches to new therapies to combat advanced prostate cancer. 

Andrea Califano, Dr.

Andrea Califano , Dr., a pioneer in the field of systems biology and founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC), has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) . Membership in the NAM is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievements and commitment to service.  

A physicist by training, Dr. Califano has taken innovative, systematic approaches to identify the molecular factors that lead to cancer progression and to the emergence of drug resistance at the single-cell level. Directing the conversation about cancer research away from focusing solely on gene mutations, Dr. Califano examines the complex and tumor-specific molecular interaction networks that determine cancer cell behavior. Using information theoretic approaches, analysis of these networks can precisely pinpoint master regulator proteins that are mechanistically responsible for supporting tumorigenesis and for implementing tumor cell homeostasis. Dr. Califano and his lab have shown that master regulators represent critical drivers and tumor dependencies, despite the fact that they are rarely mutated or differentially expressed, thus establishing them as a bona fide new class of therapeutic targets.

Scientists stunted the puberty of male worms by starving them before they underwent sexual maturation. In the study, published in Nature and led by Oliver Hobert,PhD, researchers suggested that stress from starvation even days before sexual maturation prevented normal changes in the wiring patterns of key neuronal circuits, which caused adult male worms to act immature.

“We found that environmental stress can permanently and profoundly impact the connectivity of a developing nervous system,” said Dr. Hobert, professor of biological sciences at Columbia University and a faculty member of the Department of Systems Biology.

The researchers’ results also suggested that these responses to stress were, in part, controlled by serotonin, a neurotransmitter associated with depression in humans.

Initially, Emily Bayer, a graduate student in the Hobert Lab and co-author of the work, stressed out immature worms when she accidentally left them unattended for a few weeks. This caused the worms to pause their normal growth and enter what scientists call a “dauer state.”

Eventually, Bayer returned the worms to their normal environment and let them grow into adults. After examining the nervous systems of stressed worms, she noticed something unusual. Normally, some of the neuronal connections in the males’ tails are eliminated, or pruned, during sexual maturation. Instead, she found that immature connections in the stressed worms remained. Follow-up experiments suggested that this was strictly caused by starvation and no other forms of stress – such as heat – could have caused the dauer state.

“I was totally surprised. In fact, I never thought stressing the worms out would matter,” said Bayer. 

She also found that starvation before sexual maturation caused male adult worms to act immaturely during behaviors known to be controlled by these circuits. Unlike normal adult males, the stressed worms were highly sensitive to a noxious chemical called SDS. Stressed worms swam away from SDS while normal males barely responded. The stressed worms also had problems mating. Specifically, they spent much less time in contact with hermaphrodite worms than normal males.

Tuuli Lappalainen (top photo) and Stephane Castel co-led the new study. The hypothesis of the study is illustrated here with an example in which an individual is heterozygous for both a regulatory variant and a pathogenic coding variant. The two possible haplotype configurations would result in either decreased penetrance of the coding variant, if it was on the lower-expressed haplotype, or increased penetrance of the coding variant, if it was on the higher-expressed haplotype. (Composite image courtesy of NYGC)

Researchers at the New York Genome Center (NYGC) and Columbia University's Department of Systems Biology have uncovered a molecular mechanism behind one of biology’s long-standing mysteries: why individuals carrying identical gene mutations for a disease end up having varying severity or symptoms of the disease. In this widely acknowledged but not well understood phenomenon, called variable penetrance, the severity of the effect of disease-causing variants differs among individuals who carry them. 

Reporting in the Aug. 20 issue of Nature Genetics, the researchers provide evidence for modified penetrance, in which genetic variants that regulate gene activity modify the disease risk caused by protein-coding gene variants. The study links modified penetrance to specific diseases at the genome-wide level, which has exciting implications for future prediction of the severity of serious diseases such as cancer and autism spectrum disorder.

NYGC Core Faculty Member and Systems Biology Assistant Professor Dr. Tuuli Lappalainen, PhD, led the study alongside post-doctoral research fellow Dr. Stephane Castel.

Julia Glade Bender, MD, (center) at the Hyundai Hope on Wheels announcement Mar. 29 during the New York International Auto Show at the Jacob Javitz Center. (Photo courtesy of HHOW)

A team of researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) has recently been awarded a five-year $2.5 million grant from Hyundai Hope on Wheels (HHOW) to fund innovative pediatric cancer research. 

The team at Columbia is being led by principal investigator (PI), Julia Glade Bender , MD, associate professor of pediatrics at CUIMC, with co-PIs Andrea Califano , Dr, chair of Columbia’s Department of Systems Biology and Darrell Yamashiro , MD, PhD, director of pediatric hematology, oncology and stem cell transplantation, along with researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering, University of San Francisco Children’s and Dana-Farber Cancer Center. 

The Quantum Collaboration award from HHOW is aimed at funding research focused on childhood cancers with poor prognosis. At Columbia, the team will target osteosarcoma, the most commonly diagnosed bone tumor in children and adolescents. No new treatment approaches have successfully been introduced for osteosarcoma in nearly 40 years, and patients with the disease have not benefited from recent breakthroughs like immunotherapy or DNA sequencing and require a shift in the understanding and approach to therapy. 

The proposed model of selective Let-7 microRNA suppression modulated by the bipartite LIN28 binding.(Image courtesy of Zhang Lab)

A new study led by Chaolin Zhang, PhD , assistant professor of systems biology , published today as the cover story of  Molecular Cell , sheds light on a critical RNA-binding protein that is widely researched for its role in stem cell biology and its ties to cancer progression in multiple tissues.

The LIN28 RNA-binding protein, initially found in worms about 15 years ago, is specifically expressed in stem cells.  It became well known because the protein is one of the four factors that were used to “reprogram” skin cells to induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, a breakthrough that was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2012. More recently, it was determined that the LIN28 RNA-binding protein can also be reactivated in cancer to drive tumor growth and progression. Due to its critical importance in developmental and cancer biology, scientists want to understand the role LIN28 plays at the molecular level. This new study provides some understanding of how the LIN28 protein suppresses a specific family of microRNAs, called Let-7, which are selectively lost in cancer.

“Let-7 microRNAs are the major downstream targets controlled by LIN28 identified so far. While LIN28 is mostly found in stem cells, Let-7 is only detected in differentiated cells because of stem cell-specific suppression by LIN28. However, the interplay between the two is still not well understood,” says Dr. Zhang, who is also a member of Columbia University’s Center for Motor Neuron Biology and Disease . “This study contributes to our understanding of how LIN28 suppresses Let-7, as well as provides a refined model for this important, rather complex molecular pathway.”

Schematic diagram for the OncoTreat clinical pipeline. The pipeline consists of a series of pre-computed components, including a reference set of more than 13,000 tumor expression profiles representing 35 different tumor types, a collection of 28 tissue context-specific interactomes and a database of context-specific mechanism of action (MoA) for >400 FDA-approved drugs and investigational compounds in oncology. The transcriptome of the perturbed cell lines is profiled at low cost by PLATE-Seq. The process begins with the expression profile of a single patient sample, which is compared against the tumor databank to generate a tumor gene expression signature. This signature is interpreted by VIPER using a context-matched interactome to identify the set of most dysregulated proteins, which constitute the regulators of the tumor cell state – tumor checkpoint. These proteins are then aligned against the drugs’ and compounds’ MoA database, to prioritize compounds able to invert the activity pattern of the tumor checkpoint. (Image courtesy of Califano Lab)

Researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) have developed a highly innovative computational framework that can support personalized cancer treatment by matching individual tumors with the drugs or drug combinations that are most likely to kill them. 

The study, online today in Nature Genetics , by Dr. Andrea Califano of Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Dr. Irvin Modlin of Yale University and Wren Laboratories LLC, co-senior author on the study, with collaborators from 17 research centers worldwide, details a proof of concept for a novel analytical platform applicable to any cancer type and validates its predictions on gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (GEP-NETs). The latter represent a rare class of tumors of the digestive system that, when metastatic, are associated with poor survival. 

Richard Carvajal (left) and Raul Rabadan are lead PIs on Project GENIE

Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) has recently joined 11 new institutions to collaborate on Project GENIE, an ambitious consortium organized by the  American Association for Cancer Research . An international cancer registry built through data sharing,  Project GENIE , which stands for Genomics Evidence Neoplasia Information Exchange, brings together leading institutions in cancer research and treatment in order to provide the statistical power needed to improve clinical decision-making, particularly in the case of rare cancers and rare genetic variants in common cancers. Additionally, the registry, established in 2016, is powering novel clinical and translational research. In its first two years, Project GENIE has been able to accumulate and make public more than 39,000 cancer genomic records, de-identified to maintain patient privacy. 

Each subgraph in this image is a family reconstructed from EHR data: Each node represents an individual and the colors represent different health conditions. (Figure: Nicholas Tatonetti, PhD, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons).

Acne is highly heritable, passed down through families via genes, but anxiety appears more strongly linked to environmental causes, according to a new study that analyzed data from millions of electronic health records to estimate the heritability of hundreds of different traits and conditions. 

As reported by the Columbia Newsroom, the findings, published in Cell by researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian could streamline efforts to understand and mitigate disease risk—especially for diseases with no known disease-associated genes.

“Knowledge of a condition’s heritability—how much the condition’s variability can be attributed to genes—is essential for understanding the biological causes of the disease and for precision medicine,” says study co-leader Nicholas Tatonetti, PhD , the Herbert Irving Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and an assistant professor of systems biology. “It is clinically useful for estimating disease risk, customizing treatment, and tailoring patient care.”

Sebastien Weyn, a graduating PhD student in the Chaolin Zhang lab, has been awarded the Titus M. Coan Prize for Excellence in Research. Weyn, who intends to participate in the May 13 Hooding Ceremony at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (P&S), is one of two graduates who has received the award, bestowed annually by P&S. Weyn is being recognized in the area of outstanding basic cell and molecular research. 

“I am happy to represent Systems Biology for the award, which together with previous DSB winners, showcase the important biological contributions coming from the department,” says Weyn. “Winning this award also speaks greatly to my mentor, Chaolin, and his vision and insight in the field.”

Work in the Zhang lab concentrates on the study of the nervous system and its underlying molecular mechanisms. The group focuses on the function of post-transcriptional gene regulation, in particular a level of molecular regulation called alternative RNA splicing, in the nervous system.

“The regulation of RNA splicing is surprisingly mysterious despite the fact that it is critical for proper cellular function, and there are several genetic diseases that result from improper splicing,” notes Weyn. “Understanding splicing can lead to breakthrough therapies.” 

For his dissertation project, Weyn dissected the regulatory mechanisms underlying dynamic alternative splicing switches during neurodevelopment. His work led to insights into the role that Rbfox proteins have in promoting mature splicing patterns, including in a number of autism candidate risk genes. The Rbfox family of proteins are important regulators of alternative splicing and mutations of these genes have been linked to several neurodevelopmental disorders. 

Published Spring 2018 cover story , Columbia Magazine

As reported by David J. Craig, senior editor at Columbia Magazine , we are living in the age of big data, and with every link we click, every message we send, and every movement we make, we generate torrents of information. In the past two years, the world has produced more than 90 percent of all the digital data that has ever been created. New technologies churn out an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes per day. 

Today, researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) are using the power of data to identify previously unrecognized drug side effects; they are predicting outbreaks of infectious diseases by monitoring Google search queries and social-media activity; and they are developing novel cancer treatments by using predictive analytics to model the internal dynamics of diseased cells. These ambitious projects, many of which involve large interdisciplinary teams of computer scientists, engineers, statisticians, and physicians, represent the future of academic research.

Craig covers Dr. Nicholas Tatonetti's work involving prescription drug safety and his innovative use of digital health and clinical records and Dr. Andrea Califano's unconventional computational approaches in advancing cancer research.

To read the full article , visit the online issue of Columbia Magazine . 

Gradually eliminating low-affinity binding sites identified by NRLB (from left to right) results in a gradual reduction of gene expression (white); Credit: Mann Lab/Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute

As reported  by the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University researchers have developed a new computational method for deciphering DNA’s most well-kept secrets, and this new algorithm may help find the links between genes and disease. 

The researchers included lead PI at Zuckerman  Richard Mann , PhD, with collaborator, Harmen Bussemaker , PhD, both faculty members of the Department of Systems Biology. They recently published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

“The genomes of even simple organisms such as the fruit fly contain 120 million letters worth of DNA, much of which has yet to be decoded because the cues it provides have been too subtle for existing tools to pick up,” said Mann, who is also Higgins Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics and senior author of the paper. “But our new algorithm lets us sweep through these millions of lines of genetic code and pick up even the faintest signals, resulting in a much more complete picture what DNA encodes.”

A few years ago, the two labs--Mann and Bussemaker--developed a genetic sequencing method called SELEX-seq to systematically characterize all Hox binding sites. Hox genes are known as the drivers of some of the body's earliest and most critical aspects of growth and differentiation. Still, SELEX-seq had limitations: It required the same DNA fragment to be sequenced over and over again. With each new round, more pieces of the puzzle were revealed, but information about those critical low-affinity binding sites remained hidden.

Harmen Bussemaker (left) and Tuuli Lappalainen

Harmen Bussemaker, PhD, and Tuuli Lappalainen, PhD, have received an inaugural Roy and Diana Vagelos Precision Medicine Pilot Award for a collaboration that will bridge quantitative genetics and mechanistic biology to obtain a mechanistic understanding of regulatory effects of genetic variants in humans.

Drs. Bussemaker and Lappalainen, both faculty in Columbia’s Department of Systems Biology, represent one of three winning proposals out of a pool of 56 applications. Their project titled, “Elucidating the tissue-specific molecular mechanisms underlying disease associations through integrative analysis of genetic variation and molecular network data”, will help to advance Columbia University’s efforts in precision medicine basic science research. 

As reported by Columbia Precision Medicine, the investigators’ research objectives include: to dissect the molecular mechanisms underlying tissue-specificity of genetic regulatory variants and to map network-level regulatory variants that cause protein-level transcription factor (TF) activity to vary between individuals. The investigators will infer TF activity based on DNA binding specificity models of human TFs, and use it as a tissue-specific parameter of the cellular environment. They will also map trans-acting genetic variants that affect TF activity (coined ‘aQTLs’ by one of the investigators) in each tissue. The investigators hope to elucidate which transcription factors are driving the functional impact and tissue specificity of any particular eQTL, genomic loci that contribute to variation in gene expression levels. 

Study lead coauthors Nathan Johns (left), systems biology graduate student in the Wang Lab, and Antonio Gomes, former member of the Wang Lab, now at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Advances in synthetic biology have already spurred innovation in the areas of drug development, chemical production and health diagnostics. To help push the field even further, and potentially at a more rapid pace, a new, comprehensive resource devised by Columbia University investigators will help synthetic biologists better engineer designs for complex biological systems.

A team of researchers, led by Harris Wang, PhD, assistant professor of systems biology and of pathology and cell biology, report the characterization and analysis of thousands of bacterial regulatory elements in different species of bacteria. The paper , published March 19, appears in Nature Methods .

Synthetic biology employs well-characterized genetic parts to assemble gene circuits with specific functions, such as producing chemicals or sensing the environment. The toolbox of genetic parts to make functioning genetic circuits, however, has been limiting. A key shortfall is the availability of precisely measured regulatory sequences-segments of DNA responsible for dialing up or dialing down the expression of proteins within an organism. For many commercially useful bacteria, tuning gene expression has been challenging because of a lack of reliable regulatory sequences. 

"Synthetic biology is now at a precipice where we are not just demonstrating proof-of-concept in the laboratory but we're moving toward real-world applications," says Nathan Johns , lead coauthor of the paper, a member of the Wang Lab and a graduate student in the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia. "To facilitate this, having a wide array of useful genetic components and measurement techniques-in our case, regulatory sequences-are extremely helpful." 

Two new precision medicine tests, born out of research from the Califano Lab, that look beyond cancer genes to identify novel therapeutic targets have just received New York State Department of Health approval and are now available to both oncologists and cancer researchers for use at the front lines of patient care. As reported by Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC), the tests are based on research conducted by CUIMC investigators—and could pave the way for a more precise approach to cancer therapy and help find effective drugs when conventional approaches to precision medicine have failed.

“This means that the vast majority of cancer patients who do not have actionable mutations, or have not responded to, or have relapsed after chemotherapy or targeted therapy, now have access to additional tests that can help their oncologist select the treatment best suited to their specific tumor,” says the tests’ lead developer, Andrea Califano, Dr., chair of systems biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

The two tests, DarwinOncoTreat and DarwinOncoTarget, are available exclusively through the Laboratory of Personalized Genomic Medicine in the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. The tests were developed by DarwinHealth, a Manhattan-based biotech firm founded in 2015 by Dr. Califano and colleague, Gideon Bosker, MD.

For the complete article, visit the CUIMC Newsroom.

Pictured above, Adolfo Ferrando (left), professor of pediatrics and of pathology and cell biology at Columbia, with Luis Arnes, associate research scientist and first-place winner of the symposium's poster competition; For photos from the symposium, visit the gallery page . Credit: Lydia Lee Photography

A multidisciplinary team of researchers across Columbia University have been busy addressing the complex challenges in basic and translational cancer research. Faculty and investigators are bridging their expertise in fields ranging from mathematics, biology, and engineering to physics, genomics, and chemistry to develop innovative approaches to better understand, for instance, cancer disease progression, drug resistance, and the systems-wide network of tumor evolution.

Central to this ongoing work is research grounded in cancer genomics and mathematical data analysis explored during a two-day conference Feb. 7-8 co-hosted by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) centers at Columbia University Medical Center, Cornell University, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. (Visit the Rabadan Lab YouTube Channel for video of the symposium).

"Genomics is becoming an important tool for the quantitative study of biological systems,” says Raul Rabadan, PhD , professor of systems biology at Columbia and director of the Center for Topology of Cancer Evolution and Heterogeneity and of the Program for Mathematical Genomics . “This meeting organized by four different NCI centers addressed some of the important challenges and new perspectives on the quantitative understanding of cancer using genomics tools.”

Shown here, a human pancreatic tumor stained with Masson's trichrome; Image credit: Dr. Kenneth Olive

The Lustgarten Foundation has awarded Columbia University’s Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC) a three-year grant, as part of its Translational Clinical Program, to test a new precision medicine approach to the treatment of metastatic pancreatic cancer.

“The prevailing model in personalized cancer treatment is to attack the DNA mutations that are believed to be driving an individual patient’s tumor,” says principal investigator Kenneth P. Olive, PhD , assistant professor of medicine and pathology & cell biology at HICCC. “While this approach has been astonishingly effective for a handful of rare cancers, we expect it will only work for a very small fraction of patients with the most common types of cancer.”

Pancreatic ductal carcinoma (PDA)—the most common form of pancreatic cancer—is a case in point. Researchers have identified few genetic drivers in pancreatic tumors, and the most common driver ( KRAS ) is not easily targeted. Conservatively, only about 15 percent of PDA patients are likely to benefit from conventional DNA mutation-based precision medicine therapies and most of these will either not respond or will relapse with a drug-resistant form of the disease.

“Our study takes an entirely new approach,” says Dr. Olive. “Instead of looking at the mutations encoded in a tumor’s DNA, we analyze the tumor’s RNA. Since RNA is the tissue-specific ‘working copy’ of a cancer cell’s DNA, it’s a more accurate reflection of the genetic programs that are active in a tumor and critical for its survival. We can then match the patient to approved and investigational drugs that inhibit those programs.”