Mohammad Rahman, Ph.D. was awarded a grant from the Arkansas Breast Cancer Research Program for his project, “Manipulating RNA Splicing as a Targeted Therapeutic Approach in Breast Cancer.” Dr. Rahman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and a member of the Cancer Biology Research Program of the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute.
Alicja Urbaniak, Ph.D., will be presenting, “Trending in Science: How Social Media Can Enhance Your Career,” on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 1-2 p.m.
Dr. Urbaniak is a KL2 Mentored Research Career Development Award scholar and an instructor in the College of Medicine Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She is also an associate member of the Winthrop. P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute. Her research focuses on investigating the activity of compounds of natural origin and their derivatives as anti-cancer agents.
Dr. Urbaniak serves as an executive committee member and secretary of the Division for Drug Discovery and Development of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET), and she is a member of the Partnerships Committee. Additionally, she is an editorial board member of the Journal of Biochemical and Molecular Toxicology.
Congratulations to Xiuqi “Michael” Wang on the successful defense of his dissertation entitled, “Discovery of Imidazopyridine Analogs as FLT3-ITD Secondary Mutant Inhibitors for the Treatment of Acute Myeloid Leukemia.” Dr. Wang was mentored by Dr. Hongyu Li and will be beginning a postdoctoral position in Dr. Jun Qi’s lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School.
Increased Response to Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors with Dietary Methionine Restriction in a Colorectal Cancer Model.
Morehead LC, Garg S, Wallis KF, Simoes CC, Siegel ER, Tackett AJ, Miousse IR.
Cancers (Basel). 2023
Biotransformation research advances – 2022 year in review.
Khojasteh SC, Argikar UA, Cheruzel L, Cho S, Crouch RD, Dhaware D, Heck CJS, Johnson KM, Kalgutkar AS, King L, Liu J, Ma B, Maw H, Miller GP, Seneviratne HK, Takahashi RH, Wang S, Wei C, Jackson KD.
Drug Metab Rev. 2023
Dustyn Barnette, Ph.D., is a 2021 Biochemistry and Molecular Biology graduate. He returned to speak about career opportunities in government research.
Congratulations to Kanishka Manna, a graduate student in the lab of Stephanie Byrum, Ph.D., who won second place in the Bioinformatics Division at the SE IDeA meeting in Columbia, SC. His poster title was, “A novel proteogenomics workflow for proteoforms detection.”
I just started my sixth year in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Ph.D. program and will graduate in October.
China Pharmaceutical University, B.S. in Pharmacy (Basic Pharmacy).
I have two research interests: 1) Discovery and optimization of novel inhibitors of clinically relevant targets 2) PROTAC and its applications. I have been working on multiple research projects within these research scopes.
I’m currently working on my dissertation thesis based on one of the projects, titled: Identification of Imidazo[1,2 a]pyridine pyridine derivatives as FLT3 kinase inhibitors for potential treatments of acute myeloid leukemia.
Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a hematologic cancer characterized by proliferative, clonal, abnormally differentiated, and occasionally poorly differentiated cells. Activating mutations in FMS-like tyrosine kinase 3 (FLT3) are the most frequent genetic alteration in AML, found in approximately 30% of newly diagnosed cases, most commonly consisting of internal tandem duplication (ITD) mutations in the juxtamembrane region. Recently, several FLT3 inhibitors have demonstrated clinical activity and three are currently approved – midostaurin, quizartinib, and gilteritinib. However, their clinical efficacies are limited in part due to the emergence of secondary clinical resistance, caused by multiple mechanism including on-target FLT3 secondary mutations – FLT3-ITD/D835Y and FLT3-ITD/F691L being the most common, as well as the off-target activation of alternative pathways including the BCR-ABL pathway. Therefore, in order to overcome drug resistance and further improve outcomes, new compounds targeting FLT3-ITD with secondary mutants are urgently needed. In my works, three compounds were identified with potent anti-leukemic effects, and may be further developed for treatment of AML.
Throughout my Ph.D. periods, I got to know that research is never a solitary work. It requires frequent communication and close collaboration to get the work done.
I will seek postdoc training after my Ph.D. I have already accepted the postdoc offer at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, working with Dr. Jun Qi. My vision for my future career is to take on the academic path and be an independent principal investigator after the postdoc training.
Experiment or technique you would most like to do (could be something you enjoy doing or something you have never done but would like to get the opportunity to do)
I like the design and synthesis of new compounds because there is a sense of satisfaction in creating something new.
I like hiking and exploring nature.
Doctor of Philosophy students who passed their candidacy exams in the last year received their white coats at the Graduate School Research Induction Ceremony. Students from the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Track who received their white coats were Reham Sewilam, mentored by Robert Eoff, Ph.D., Mason McCrury, mentored by Samantha Kendrick, Ph.D., and Randall Rainwater, mentored by Marie Burdine, Ph.D. Congratulations to all!
Cutting-Edge Technologies Driving Quantitative Mass Spectrometry.
Avaritt NL, Byrum SD.
J Vis Exp. 2023
Bioactivation and reactivity research advances – 2022 year in review.
Wang S, Argikar UA, Cheruzel L, Cho S, Crouch RD, Dhaware D, Heck CJS, Johnson KM, Kalgutkar AS, King L, Liu J, Ma B, Maw H, Miller GP, Seneviratne HK, Takahashi RH, Wei C, Khojasteh SC.
Drug Metab Rev. 2023
Proteogenomic analysis of chemo-refractory high-grade serous ovarian cancer.
Chowdhury S, Kennedy JJ, Ivey RG, Murillo OD, Hosseini N, Song X, Petralia F, Calinawan A, Savage SR, Berry AB, Reva B, Ozbek U, Krek A, Ma W, da Veiga Leprevost F, Ji J, Yoo S, Lin C, Voytovich UJ, Huang Y, Lee SH, Bergan L, Lorentzen TD, Mesri M, Rodriguez H, Hoofnagle AN, Herbert ZT, Nesvizhskii AI, Zhang B, Whiteaker JR, Fenyo D, McKerrow W, Wang J, Schürer SC, Stathias V, Chen XS, Barcellos-Hoff MH, Starr TK, Winterhoff BJ, Nelson AC, Mok SC, Kaufmann SH, Drescher C, Cieslik M, Wang P, Birrer MJ, Paulovich AG.
Cell. 2023
Exosomal MicroRNA and Protein Profiles of Hepatitis B Virus-Related Hepatocellular Carcinoma Cells.
Todorova VK, Byrum SD, Mackintosh SG, Jamshidi-Parsian A, Gies AJ, Washam CL, Jenkins SV, Spiva T, Bowman E, Reyna NS.
Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2023
By Marty Trieschmann
Aug. 3, 2023 | The Birrer Laboratory at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute helped discover a proteogenomic signature in ovarian cancer that may improve the way the disease is treated around the world.
The discovery, which identifies a 64-protein-gene signature that can predict primary treatment resistance in patients with high grade ovarian cancer, was published Aug. 3 in the journal Cell.
Michael Birrer, M.D., Ph.D., director of the UAMS Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute and UAMS vice chancellor, is a senior author on the Cell publication. Birrer, who was the co-principal investigator of the U01 grant from the National Cancer Institute’s Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium, has a laboratory dedicated to the translation of the genomics of ovarian cancer into better treatment of the disease.
Amanda Paulovich, M.D., Ph.D., physician-scientist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and Birrer’s co-author on the study, praised the UAMS team for its work.
“Mike’s decades of experience treating ovarian cancer patients was crucial to ensuring that our project goals and design were crafted to meet the needs of patients with the most devastating form of this disease — platinum refractory ovarian cancers.”
The Birrer Lab helped design, implement, analyze and interpret the results of the study and was critical in assuring the project had sufficient clinically annotated patient specimens for the state of the art proteomic/genomic analysis. His team characterized proteins and genetic markers in 242 high-grade serous ovarian cancers that responded or did not respond to treatment. The tumor samples were collected from patients before they began treatment.
The overall prognosis for women with high grade ovarian cancer is challenging, although the median survival rate has improved to five years. Unfortunately, patients with refractory tumors, those that do not respond to initial therapy, remains unchanged. These patients waste precious time going through initial treatments that do not work.
“Right now, we can’t identify these ovarian cancer patients up front. We find them by default: They get sick and pass away so quickly that they can’t even be put on new clinical trials,” said Birrer. “This study is a huge step forward in that.
“For the first time, we will know if a patient is unlikely to get better with standard treatment and make better recommendations for them to immediately explore other options like new therapeutics in clinical trials.”Further, the study identifies five subgroups of refractory tumors by specific activated pathways, some of which may be targetable.
The study was led by Paulovich, Birrer and Pei Wang, Ph.D., professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine in Mount Sinai, NY.
A former Harvard Medical School professor, Birrer joined UAMS in 2019 after directing the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. A New Jersey native, he completed his medical degree and doctor of philosophy degree in 1982 in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He served his internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he realized cancer treatment and research were improving by leaps and bounds. Inspired, Birrer entered the Medical Oncology Fellowship Program at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. He was appointed professor of medicine at the Harvard School of Medicine and was director of Gynecologic Medical Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Gynecologic Oncology Research Program at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center.
