Announcing the winners: SMART-Seq Pro Biomarker Discovery Contest

Gabriele Casirati, MD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Epitope-edited hematopoiesis to enable immunotherapies for acute myeloid leukemia and explore mechanisms leading to relapse

Dr. Casirati received his Doctor of Medicine degree from Universita' Statale di Milan (Italy). He trained as a hematologist at San Raffaele Hospital, Milan. During his residency, he also worked in basic/translational research in the Gentner lab at the Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy (TIGET), where he studied intra-tumoral heterogeneity of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). He then joined as a postdoctoral researcher in the Genovese lab at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Boston) and began working on novel strategies to improve the safety and efficacy of adoptive AML immunotherapies by means of epitope-editing to endow normal stem cells with selective resistance to CAR-T or monoclonal antibodies.

Matthew Greenblatt, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College

Identifying key markers of a novel skeletal stem cell regulating neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration

Dr. Greenblatt focuses on identifying new skeletal stem cells alongside practicing as a pathologist. His lab has used a combination of mouse genetics, human xenograft studies, and bone organoid models to identify that bone is formed by multiple different types of skeletal stem cells, with each stem cell type having different locations and functions. Here, he hopes to determine how multiple stem cells collaborate to form the skull and to identify new markers that can define each of these stem cell types.

Fernando Fierro, PhD, Associate Professor, Cell Biology and Human Anatomy, UC Davis

Uncovering differences in mutant and normal cells in fibrous dysplasia/McCune Albright Syndrome (FD/MAS)

Dr. Fierro uses human bone marrow stromal cells/mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to develop novel therapies or to model diseases in a dish. For the past 4–5 years, his lab has been studying rare skeletal disorders caused by impaired differentiation of MSCs into osteoblasts. One of these diseases is Fibrous Dysplasia (FD) of the bone, which is characterized by skeletal deformities and fractures. Since the disease arises from genetic postzygotic somatic mutations, it remains critical to understand the relationship between cells with and without the mutation. It has been suggested that both types of cells are required to develop FD, as the cells communicate with each other through paracrine signaling. This project will allow us to directly interrogate this question with unprecedented molecular resolution.

Masakazu Kamata, PhD, Associate Professor, School of Medicine, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Crosstalk between therapy resistance and alternative splicing patterns

Dr. Kamata received his PhD in pharmaceutical sciences at Kyoto University in 1995. In 2002, he started a new career at the UCLA AIDS Institute working toward HIV cure therapy. In October 2018, he was hired as an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His recent efforts using immunotherapeutic strategies have provided potential tools for controlling aggressive cancers that metastasize to the brain and primary brain tumors, specifically glioblastoma. These studies provide fundamental insight into the basis of host-malignant cell interactions and will ultimately identify clinically relevant therapeutic targets to augment immune responses and restore anti-cancer immunity in patients.