Mohammad Fallahi-Sichani, an associate professor in the department of biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, has been awarded a $2 million R35 grant from the National Institutes of Health National Institute for General Medical Sciences.
The award supports research to uncover the fundamental mechanisms of information processing and decision-making in human cells.
Paving the Way for Improved Precision Medicine Strategies
Cells must constantly adapt to their environment, making decisions based on both external signals and their internal state. However, the exact mechanisms linking a cell’s decisions to its state remain unclear. This knowledge gap presents significant challenges for quantitative biology and precision medicine, particularly in understanding why genetically identical tumor cells can respond differently to the same treatment, inevitably leading to therapy resistance and disease progression in many cancer patients.
Research in the Fallahi-Sichani Lab narrows this gap using a combination of hypothesis-driven and systematic studies that leverage high-throughput, highly multiplexed technologies, single-cell profiling, transcriptomics and epigenomics analysis and computational modeling. These tools will help the research team build and experimentally validate predictive models that connect cellular states to phenotypic behaviors in genetically identical, yet phenotypically heterogeneous, populations.
The insights gained could potentially allow scientists to control cell behavior and guide cancer cells toward desired outcomes, such as selective cell death.