Wei Wei, PhD – an accomplished cancer researcher with expertise in biotechnology and cancer systems biology – has been promoted to ISB associate professor. The Wei Lab focuses on understanding how cancer cells adapt to therapeutic treatment to foster therapy resistance by coordinating their internal molecular machinery and how these adaptive changes evolve within diverse tumors influenced by the tumor microenvironment.
Infection, autoimmunity and cancer account for 40 percent of deaths worldwide. In a Cell Reports paper, ISB researchers detail how the human immune system works in common ways across diseases – findings that offer promising avenues for exploring multi-disease therapeutic strategies.
ISB hosted a free one-day Spatial Multi-Omics for Cancer Systems Biology virtual workshop. The event consisted of sessions on four topics: experimental methods, computational algorithms, applications of spatial multi-omics and a practical methods tutorial.
Scientists for the first time have used CRISPR to substitute a gene to treat patients with cancer. The remarkable findings were published in the journal Nature and presented at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) 2022.
Dr. Jim Heath was announced as a newly elected Fellow of the American Academy for Cancer Research (AACR) Academy Class of 2022. “I am honored and humbled to be recognized as part of this renowned group of researchers who have done so much to move our understanding of cancer forward,” Heath said.
Despite the aggressive nature of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC), circulating tumor cells that lead to metastases often go undetected in the blood. ISB researchers in Dr. Wei Wei’s lab and their collaborators have developed a novel method to better detect these circulating cells.
ISB researchers have found that a small, persistent increase in the expression of NOD1 could be responsible for higher cancer risks. The research team found that a slight 1.5-fold uptick in NOD1 expression can activate the protein and downstream signaling pathways in a manner similar to vast (30- to 200-fold) overexpression.
By analyzing blood plasma samples taken at several time points, ISB researchers have identified specific proteins that persistently presented as outliers and signaled metastatic cancer well before patients were diagnosed. The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports.
In findings published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers show that cancer cells can take more than one path to reach a drug-resistant cell state. These findings could have promising implications for the future of cancer care.
Members of ISB’s Heath Lab and their collaborators have developed a way to sensitively detect and analyze neoantigen-specific T-cell populations from tumors and blood. This promising development may have implications for creating targeted, individual-specific cancer vaccines.
ISB’s Dr. Sui Huang uses the theory of complex systems and applies it to cancer research. In this video Q&A, he discusses the cancer paradox and highlights the importance of understanding the mechanism of what cancer treatments can backfire in order to open a new avenue for therapy and treatments.
The Andy Hill Cancer Research Endowment (CARE) is a public-private partnership that supports cancer research in Washington state. CARE announced ISB Assistant Professor Dr. Wei Wei as a CARE Fund Distinguished Researcher and awarded him $500,000.
ISB’s Professor Sui Huang, MD, PhD, has been announced by Cancer Research UK as a member of a global research team funded through its Grand Challenge competition — an international funding initiative that aims to answer some of the biggest questions facing cancer research.
The Andy Hill Cancer Research Endowment (CARE) announced $750,000 in grant funding for Dr. Jim Heath’s work on proactive cancer immunotherapies for initial and recurrent disease. This is the first stage of a planned longer program led by Jim and ISB, and involving Swedish Cancer Institute, Earl A. Chiles Research Institute in Portland, and UW Medicine.
Dead cells, or cell debris, generated by treatments intended to eradicate tumor cells actually act as strong stimulators of tumor progression. The findings of ISB cancer biologist Sui Huang, his former mentee and longtime collaborator Dipak Panigrahy at Beth Isreal Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and colleagues at Harvard Medical School were published in The Journal of Experimental Medicine.
April 25, 2017 A Cell-Surface Membrane Protein Signature for Glioblastoma 3 bullets: Using integrated protein and gene expression data, ISB researchers developed a 33-gene signature for glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. Glioblastoma gene signatures are associated with TGF-b signaling and cancer invasion. Researchers think that some of the glioblastoma gene signatures have the potential to be used as blood biomarkers for this aggressive cancer. Read the full summary…
The Baliga Lab’s Dr. Christopher Plaisier was the lead author of the study “Causal Mechanistic Regulatory Network for Glioblastoma Deciphered Using Systems Genetics Network Analysis” which published online in Cell Systems on July 14. Dr. Plaisier wrote a summary of the research: 3 Bullets: Using data from TCGA and ENCODE, ISB researchers developed integrative database and analysis platforms that provide insight about the underpinnings of glioblastoma multiforme. Researchers developed a…
