A huge congrats to postdoc Amandine who just received an Outside-the-Box grant from the HERA Ovarian Cancer Foundation! With this award, Amandine will study the potential role of metabolites in driving chemoresistance in ovarian cancer.
We are very proud of Richard Fang who was featured in a Pittwire write-up. He will be graduating soon to go onto bigger and better things (an MD/PhD program)!
Read the story here: Richard Fang Pittwire
Congratulations to Richard who successfully defended his B. Phil this week! This is a special thesis that undergraduates in the Pitt Honors College can write and then get to defend. A cool program! No surprise Richard passed with flying colors- he’s amazing. We will miss him when he graduates later this semester.
What a few months the lab has had! Not one but TWO R01s received fundable scores, including a 1st percentile mPI grant between Katherine, Raquel, and our colleague Dr. Nadine Hempel,
Raquel also received funding for her new ovarian cancer project through the Pitt SPORE Career Enhancement Program!
Needless to say, we are hiring! Check out our projects and email us if you are interested in joining the team.
Katherine is humbled by the nomination from her team for an outstanding mentoring award. Below is a picture of the lab after accepting the award at the 2024 HCC retreat.
Congratulations to co-first authors Drs. Naveen Kumar Tangudu and Raquel Buj for this very nice study on a metabolic vulnerability in p16low cancers. Using multiple CRISPR screens and omics-based approaches, they identified de novo purine synthesis to be upregulated in p16low cancer cells. They also found that targeting this axis using anti-folates decreased proliferation of these cells both in vitro and in vivo. You can read the full text here: https://aacrjournals.org/cancerrescommun/article/doi/10.1158/2767-9764.CRC-23-0450/743061/De-novo-purine-metabolism-is-a-metabolic
Congratulations to undergraduate research Richard for being awarded a Goldwater Scholarship! He is mentored by postdoc Dr. Naveen Kumar Tangudu in the lab and is working on his undergrad thesis, which is interrogating ferroptosis in ovarian cancer.
We are excited to share our newest preprint from 1st author Dr. Apoorva Uboveja. In this project, she found something totally unexpected- aKG affects histone acetylation through carnitine synthesis. This axis promoted DNA repair by homologous recombination. These data provide new evidence for a metabolically-sensitive epigenetic axis that could be targeted for cancer therapy. They also show that methylation is not the only epigenetic change that is affected by aKG. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.06.578742v1
Congratulations to postdoc Dr. Naveen Kumar Tangudu whose DoD Pilot Award was recommended for funding! This will further his exciting work on ferroptosis and iron metabolism as a vulnerability of CCNE1-driven ovarian cancer!
Congratulations to postdoc Dr. Apoorva Uboveja whose Outside the Box grant for the HERA Ovarian Cancer Foundation was recently funded! This will further her exciting work on carnitine metabolism in ovarian cancer and DNA damage response.
Congrats to co-first authors Drs. Naveen Kumar Tangudu and Raquel Buj on their new preprint. Using CRISPR screens and pharmacological approaches, they identified purine metabolism as a metabolic vulnerability of p16-low cancers. Read more here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.15.549149v2
A warm welcome to Dr. Amadine Amalric, who joined the lab in early June. She comes to us from France where she studied RNA modifications in cancer. In the lab, she will studying compartmentalized metabolism and is co-mentored by our long-term collaborator Dr. Nate Snyder at Temple University.
Congratulations to Allison- her Magee Women’s Cancer Research Center grant to study metabolism in ovarian cancer quiescence was funded!
Big congrats to Aidan for passing his comprehensive exam this week and becoming a PhD candidate! We had a fun donut celebration!
Congratulations to Raquel for her well-deserved promotion to Research Assistant Professor! Raquel has independently moved an entire arm of the lab’s research program forward by becoming an expert in the tumor microenvironment.
Congrats to Aidan- the very first proposal he wrote was funding through a spot on the highly competitive Pharmacology T32! Next up- submitting his F31!
A huge congratulations to Apoorva who was named this week as a Hillman Postdoc Fellow for Innovative Research! This will provide professional development support as she works toward her K99 application.
Out now! The lab’s paper on how ATM inhibition induces macropinocytosis to promote survival through uptake of nutrients. Congrats to all authors!
Read the paper here: https://rupress.org/jcb/article-abstract/222/1/e202007026/213697/ATM-inhibition-drives-metabolic-adaptation-via?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Big congrats to Dr. Uboveja- this is her first grant! A huge milestone! This award will allow her to continue her very exciting work on wildtype IDH1 in cyclin E-driven ovarian cancer.
Congrats to Raquel who recently received a career development award from the Melanoma Research Foundation to better understand how a secreted factor promotes immunotherapy resistance in melanoma. This 2-year award will allow her to continue this very important work as she becomes an immunologist!
