Mohammed Fallahi-Sichani (left) and lab team
Mohammad Fallahi-Sichani, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and a faculty member of the UVA Comprehensive Cancer Center, was awarded a $2 million, five-year R35 grant renewal from the NIH National Institute for General Medical Sciences. This funding supports ongoing research in the Fallahi-Sichani lab, focusing on the fundamental mechanisms of information processing and decision-making in human cells.
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.
Dr. Fallahi-Sichani’s research aims to narrow this gap via 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, but phenotypically heterogeneous populations. The insights gained from these studies could pave the way for improved precision medicine strategies, potentially allowing scientists to control cell behavior and guide cancer cells toward outcomes like selective and effective cell death.
Filed Under: Research