Blossom Damania, Ph.D. and Dirk Dittmer, Ph.D. are honored with a Battle Distinguished Cancer Research Award.

From the School of Medicine Genetic published July 30th, Drs. Jason Stein (Assistant Professor) and Hyejung Won (Assistant Professor) have been awarded a U01 grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) for their project titled “Discovery and validation of genetic variation impacting the gene regulatory landscape during human cortical development”

Susan G. Komen®, the world’s largest nonprofit funder of cancer research, has appointed UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Melissa Troester, PhD, to this year’s class of Komen Scholars.

Boosting immune system T cells to effectively attack solid tumors, such as breast cancers, can be done by adding a small molecule to a treatment procedure called chimeric antigen receptor-T (CAR-T) cell therapy, according to a study by researchers at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. The boost helps recruit more immune cells into battle … Continued

  Natalie Stanley, PhD Dr. Stanley arrived at UNC from Professor Nima Aghaeepour’s computational immunology laboratory at Stanford University. Her current research is focused on developing bioinformatics and machine learning algorithms for gaining a systems-level understanding of human immunity from single-cell mass cytometry data. Her recently developed algorithms have been applied to understand the immune … Continued

There is an urgent need for a vaccine with efficacy against SARS-CoV-2. We hypothesize that peptide vaccines containing epitope regions optimized for concurrent B cell, CD4+ T cell, and CD8+ T cell stimulation would drive both humoral and cellular immunity with high specificity, potentially avoiding undesired effects such as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE)

Christoph Rau, PhD My research focuses on using model organism populations to study cardiovascular disease.  I obtained my PhD in Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics at UCLA, where I began working with the Hybrid Mouse Diversity Panel to study the genetics underlying heart failure.  In my postdoc, I expanded into studying the epigenome and developing … Continued

A multidisciplinary team led by Dr. Mark Zylka shows that deletion of TOP1, an enzyme that relieves DNA stress during transcription, in neurons causes genomic instability and early onset of neurodegeneration. Read this exciting work in Nature  

Researchers led by Blossom Damania, PhD, reported that Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus, a virus linked to three human cancers, uses a protein produced by its human host to come out of hiding and reactivate.

Jonathan Serody, MD, director of UNC’s Bone Marrow Transplantation & Cellular Therapy Program, is the new division chief for hematology. Ethan Basch, MD, the Richard M. Goldberg Distinguished Professor in Medical Oncology, is the new division chief for oncology. Both are members of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. More