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Kyle Allison Featured in NIH Director’s Blog

Kyle AllisonKyle Allison, a Systems Biology Fellow in the Columbia University Department of Systems Biology and recent winner of a National Institutes of Health Early Independence Award, is featured this week in a blog post authored by NIH Director Francis Collins. The article highlights Dr. Allison’s ongoing efforts to use approaches based in systems biology to understand bacterial persistence, a phenomenon that in clinical settings can often lead to dangerous, difficult-to-manage infections.

Read the complete post here: Creative Minds: Searching for Solutions to Chronic Infection.

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Prestigious NIH Director's Awards Go to Two Department of Systems Biology Researchers

Dana Pe'er and Kyle Allison

Dana Pe'er has received the Pioneer Award for high-risk, high-reward research, and postdoctoral scientist Kyle Allison has won an Early Independence Award.

Two members of the Columbia University Department of Systems Biology have been named recipients of NIH Director’s Awards from the National Institutes of Health Common Fund.

Associate Professor Dana Pe’er is one of 10 winners of the 2014 NIH Director’s Pioneer Awards. The Pioneer Awards provide up to $2.5 million over 5 years to support exceptionally creative investigators who are pursuing “high risk, high reward” science that holds great potential to transform biomedical or behavioral research. The award will support an ambitious new project to develop the technological and computational methods necessary to create a comprehensive, high-resolution atlas of development for all cell types in the human body.

In addition, Kyle Allison, a postdoctoral scientist in the laboratory of Professor Saeed Tavazoie, has received the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. (Dr. Tavazoie is also a past winner of the Pioneer Award.) This program enables outstanding young investigators who have recently completed their PhD’s to move rapidly into independent research positions. Dr. Allison is one of just 17 scientists to receive this award this year. In combination with the Department of Systems Biology Fellows program, this five-year, $1.25 million grant will allow him to open his own laboratory at Columbia and pursue independent research to investigate the problem of bacterial persistence. He is the second Department of Systems Biology investigator to receive the Early Independence Award, joining Assistant Professor Harris Wang in being recognized with this honor.

“Having four recipients of NIH Director’s Awards within the Department of Systems Biology — and particularly two in one year — is quite remarkable,” said Department Chair Andrea Califano. “I think it’s a testimony to the timeliness of the perspectives and tools that systems biology offers and to the high quality of research being conducted at Columbia. I look forward to the discoveries that will undoubtedly come from Dana’s and Kyle’s extremely exciting efforts.”

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Grant Will Support Annotation of Metabolic Networks in Pathogenic Bacteria

M. Tuberculosis Culture

M. tuberculosis bacterial colonies. Photo credit: CDC/Dr. George Kubica [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Dennis Vitkup, an associate professor in the Columbia University Department of Systems Biology and Department of Biomedical Informatics, has  been awarded an R01 grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to develop a computational pipeline for predicting bacterial metabolic networks. Building on a framework called GLOBUS that was previously developed in his lab, the project will produce probabilistic annotations of metabolic networks for all of the major bacterial species that cause disease in humans. It will both offer a method that can be used to study metabolism in any species of bacteria and produce valuable information that will aid researchers who are looking for therapies against many of the world’s most deadly pathogens.

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Tracking the H1N1 Pandemic Virus

Flu cases in early 2009

Because flu viruses mutate nearly once every reproduction cycle, no two people are made sick by precisely the same virus, as illustrated by this chart documenting swine flu cases among humans in early 2009.

The recent outbreak and sudden spread of a novel H1N1 influenza virus has caused a worldwide concern and has tested our ability to respond to major public health challenges. Significant scientific resources have been marshaled to discover the best possible responses against this novel swine origin influenza virus. A group led by Raul Rabadan at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University has been studying the evolution of influenza viruses and the origins of flu pandemics by analyzing large data sets that contain genomic information.

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