Tal Korem
News
As a member of the Program for Mathematical Genomics, Tal Korem is bringing his interests in systems biology, quantitative research, and the human microbiome to areas of clinical relevance. For Dr. Korem, that clinical focus is women’s reproductive health. “There is still a lot we don’t understand that relates to women’s health, to fertility, and to birth outcomes, and how microbes play a role in all of this,” says Dr. Korem. In this Q+A, learn about Dr. Korem's ongoing research and his path to the field of systems biology and women's health.
Tal Korem, PhD, assistant professor of systems biology, has been named a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar, a fellowship that supports leading early-career researchers in science and technology. As a global scholar, Dr. Korem joins 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.
Our gut microbiome has been linked to everything from obesity and diabetes to heart disease and even neurological disorders and cancer. Researchers have been sorting through the multiple bacterial species that populate the microbiome, asking which of them can be implicated in specific disorders. But in a new study, co-led by Dr. Tal Korem and published in Nature, addressed a new question: "What if the same microbe is different in different people?" The study details a novel computational method that systematically identifies structural variants across human gut microbiomes, and could help scientists pinpoint the connections between our microbiome, health and disease.
Armed with a new two-year, $1 million grant from the Pancreatic Cancer Collective, a global team of researchers, led by Dr. Raul Rabadan, is working to develop a comprehensive computational framework that will identify high-risk factors for pancreatic cancer. The team will attack pancreatic cancer research from multiple disciplines—genomics, mathematics and medicine—to provide an integrated approach to studying the contributing factors to this lethal disease. The need for a deeper understanding of pancreatic cancer is pressing--it is projected to become the second leading cause of cancer-related mortality within the next decade.