Systems Biology will receive $3,829,859 over five years from the National Institute of Mental Health for “Discovery and Analysis of Brain Circuits and Cell Types Affected in Autism and Schizophrenia.” The project will be led by Dennis Vitkup, PhD, and Joseph Gogos, MD, PhD.

Read full article in CUIMC Newsroom.

The 2021 Pershing Square Sohn Prize for Young Investigators in Cancer Research has been awarded to Xuebing Wu, PhD, for his innovative approaches to cancer research. The Pershing Square Sohn Prize is an annual award that provides early career scientists the freedom to take risks and pursue bold research at a stage when traditional funding is lacking. At Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Dr. Wu shares the designation with Christine Iok In Chio, PhD, whose work focuses on the biological mechanisms that drive pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.

With the support from the Pershing Foundation, Dr. Wu and his lab aim to develop a technology for mutation-specific elimination of tumor cells, by integrating a highly programmable CRISPR “gene-editing” system with advanced machine learning algorithms. 

Read the full article in the HICCC Newsroom. 

Two Systems Biology GRAs Receive Awards

Tomasz Blazejewski has received the 2021 Dean's Award for Excellence in Research. His PhD research centered on generative models for biological sequences, a relatively new area at the interface of machine learning and biology. “I'm deeply appreciative to my advisor, Harris Wang,” says Blazejewski, “for giving me the freedom to investigate this relatively uncharted area, and to my thesis committee for its guidance as I tried to figure out the best approaches to the problem.”

Hanna Mendes Levitin has received the Titus M Coan Award for Excellence in Research. Her PhD research focused on extracting biological signals from-high dimensional data, specifically in the context of high-grade glioma, and on human tissue T cell activation. “I was surprised to receive the award,” says Levitin, “and believe it speaks to the excellence of my collaborators and mentors—especially my advisor, Dr. Peter Sims, and the entire Sims lab, as well as our collaborators, Dr. Donna Farber, Dr. Peter Canoll, and Dr. David Blei, and their respective labs.

Dr. Tal Korem

Tal Korem, PhD, has been named a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar, a fellowship that supports leading early-career researchers in science and technology. 

Dr. Korem is an assistant professor of systems biology with a joint appointment in obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons, and a faculty member of the Program for Mathematical Genomics . As a global scholar, he is joining CIFAR’s Humans and the Microbiome research program, where his work will focus on harnessing human microbial communities to identify and develop novel diagnostic and therapeutic tools.

CIFAR’s  Azrieli Global Scholars program supports its fellows through funding and mentorship, emphasizing essential network and professional skills development. The scholars join CIFAR research programs for a two-year period where they collaborate with fellows and brainstorm new approaches to pressing science and technology problems. Research topics are diverse, ranging from bio-solar energy and visual consciousness to engineered proteins and the immune system. 

Dr. Korem is one of 14 researchers out of an applicant pool of 217 selected by the Canadian-based nonprofit organization. This year’s cohort represents citizenship in eight countries and appointments in institutions from Canada, the U.S.,  Israel, Australia, the Netherlands, and Spain.

-Melanie A. Farmer

Columbia investigators win Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grants to accelerate development of cellular roadmap of the human body.

In two groundbreaking research projects contributing to the Human Cell Atlas, Columbia University scientists are tasked with mapping complete cells in the immune system and the human spine. The global effort is aiming to identify and define every cell type of the human body and create a collection of maps for navigating the cellular basis of human health and disease.

Peter Sims, PhD, assistant professor of systems biology

The Columbia teams, which include co-principal investigators from the Department of Systems Biology Drs. Peter Sims and Raul Rabadan , are among the 38 collaborative science teams launching the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s (CZI) Seed Networks for the Human Cell Atlas project announced today. The three-year projects, receiving a total of $68 million in award funding by Seed Networks, are collaborative groups that are bringing together expertise in science, computational biology, software engineering, and medicine to support the ongoing progress of the Human Cell Atlas .

Investigating the Immune System + Aging

Dr. Sims, part of an international team including close collaborator Dr. Donna Farber of the Department of Surgery , is combining single-cell sequencing technologies, data analysis, and immunology expertise to better understand how the immune system ages and gain new insights into how human diseases occur. 

Dr. Raul Rabadan is leading a global research project as part of a new grant from the Pancreatic Cancer Collective to identify high-risk factors of pancreatic cancer. (Courtesy of Stand Up to Cancer)

A global team of researchers led by theoretical physicist Raul Rabadan, PhD, professor of systems biology at Columbia’s Vagelos School of Physicians and Surgeons, and Núria Malats, MD, PhD, head of the Genetic and Molecular Epidemiology Group of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), are working to develop a comprehensive computational framework that will identify high-risk factors for pancreatic cancer.  

Armed with a new two-year, $1 million grant from the Pancreatic Cancer Collective, the team intends to attack pancreatic cancer research from multiple disciplines—genomics, mathematics and medicine—to provide an integrated, computational approach to studying genomic, environmental and immune factors that could identify populations at high risk of pancreatic cancer. The need for deeper understanding of the contributing factors to this lethal disease is pressing, as pancreatic cancer is projected to become the second leading cause of cancer-related mortality within the next decade. 

Drs. Raul Rabadan and Nuria Malats

Peter Sims, PhD

The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research has awarded Peter Sims , PhD, an Emerging Leader Award and will support his work to advance a novel use of single-cell RNA sequencing to develop brain cancer treatments. Dr. Sims, assistant professor of systems biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, is one of just eight recipients of the inaugural grant, given to promising early career scientists for projects aimed at substantially unmet needs in cancer risk prediction, prevention, detection and treatment. 

Dr. Sims is an early contributor to the emerging field of large-scale single-cell RNA sequencing, which has made it possible to analyze tens of thousands of cells while simultaneously obtaining imaging and genomic data from each individual cell. He will be using this approach to improve patient-derived models of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), an aggressive form of cancer that invades the brain, making complete resection difficult. In other words, making it extremely difficult in surgery to remove all cancerous cells from the brain. To date, drug therapies for this type of aggressive brain cancer have had limited success, partly because of the heterogeneity of these tumors. Furthermore,  current patient-derived models for researching glioblastoma do not fully recapitulate the cellular diversity of tumor cells that are present in the tumor, so it is extremely challenging to classify those cells in order to match them with the drug therapies that work. 

Indeed, there is a critical need to better characterize and understand GBM. Dr. Sims has collaborated with several brain tumor experts in the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center , including Drs. Peter Canoll, Jeffrey Bruce, Antonio Iavarone and Anna Lasorella to advance single-cell genomic approaches to characterizing this disease. Approaching this problem at the single cell level could result in development of novel treatments that  prioritize and identify the specific drug therapies that may actually work on diminishing these tumor cells. The ultimate goal is to attain better predictions of therapeutic efficacy. 

Suying Bao, PhD

Suying Bao, a postdoctoral research scientist in the Chaolin Zhang lab , has been named an inaugural Precision Medicine Research fellow by Columbia’s Irving Institute of Clinical and Translational Research . The two-year fellowship aims to train postdocs to use genomics and complex clinical data to improve personalized and tailored clinical care and clinical outcomes. 

This fellowship “will provide me with more opportunities to translate my findings from basic science research into clinical application,” says Bao, “and pave my way towards an independent researcher in this field.” 

Bao’s expertise lies in RNA regulation at the interface of systems biology, ranging from the specificity of protein-RNA interaction to function of specific splice variants. RNA regulation is critical in proper cellular function; gaining deeper insights into this complex molecular mechanism will promote the development of precision medicine therapies. 

In this project, Bao is aiming to develop new approaches to identify causal noncoding regulatory variants (RVs) modulating post-transcriptional gene expression regulation, such as RNA splicing and stability.  “A majority of genetic variants associated with human diseases reside in noncoding genomic regions with regulatory roles,” notes Bao. “Thus, elucidating how these noncoding regulatory variants contribute to gene expression variation is a crucial step towards unraveling genotype-phenotype relationships and advancing precision medicine for common and complex diseases.”

To identify these RVs, she will leverage massive datasets of high-throughput profiles of gene expression and protein-RNA interactions generated from large cohorts of normal and disease human tissues and cell lines by multiple consortia, such as ENCODE, GTEx and CommonMind, and develop innovative computational methods of data mining. 

Michael Shen, PhD (Image Courtesy of the Shen Lab)

The Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network (BCAN) has awarded Professor Michael Shen, PhD, the 2018 Bladder Cancer Research Innovation Award. The honor is given to scientists whose novel, creative research has great potential to produce breakthroughs in the management of bladder cancer.  

Dr. Shen, who is professor of medicine, genetics & development, urology and systems biology at Columbia University, has used new techniques of 3D cell culture to establish “organoids” from primary bladder tumors obtained from patients. These personalized laboratory models, which the Shen lab can create in a matter of weeks, provide a new, innovative way to study the molecular mechanisms associated with drug response and drug resistance in bladder cancer patients. 

The BCAN award supports the Shen lab’s efforts in furthering their work in patient-derived bladder tumor organoids . 

“We will employ these organoid lines to examine how specific oncogenic drivers may regulate the invasiveness and metastatic ability of muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC), both in cell culture and in mouse models,” says Dr. Shen. “Our goal is to use these new experimental approaches to provide molecular insights into the lethal properties of human MIBC, which will hopefully lead to improved therapeutic approaches.”

Bladder cancer is the fifth most common cancer in the United States, and the primary treatment of the disease is surgery. Overall, this new project will examine central questions of bladder cancer biology using Dr. Shen’s innovative approach involving patient-derived tumor organoids, and may provide the basis for future therapies for metastatic bladder cancer.