Seminar with Olga Anczukȯw, Ph.D.
2025-05-15 14:00 - 15:00 (America/New_York) | Bioinformatics Building, Room 1131, 130 Mason Farm Rd, Chapel Hill, NC, 27514, United States
In-person only

About the speaker:
Dr. Olga Anczuków, PhD, Associate Professor at The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, Farmington, CT, is an investigator with expertise in RNA and cancer biology. She is a Research Program Co-Leader at the NCI-designated Jackson Laboratory Cancer Center. She completed her PhD at University Claude Bernard Lyon 1 in France, and her postdoctoral training at Cold Spring Harbor laboratory, NY, USA.
The goals of her research program (www.anczukowlab.com) are to understand how misregulation of alternative RNA splicing, including alterations driven by aging, contributes to cancer, and to develop novel therapeutic strategies to target splicing regulators and their targets.
Her laboratory uses patient-derived organoids, mouse models, and RNA-sequencing to identify splicing alterations that contribute to tumor initiation, metastasis, and drug resistance. She identified splicing factors and their targets that promote tumor initiation and/or invasion and metastasis in in vivo and in vitro models of breast cancer. Using short- and long-read RNA-sequencing, her work further defined the splicing landscape of human primary tumors and discovered novel tumor-specific full-length isoforms associated with prognosis in breast cancer, as well as other tumors types. In particular, her work revealed a pan-cancer splicing signature of MYC activity and nominated novel targets for MYC-driven tumors. Finally, her lab is leveraging RNA-based therapeutics to study the function of specific aging and cancer-associated isoforms as well as to design novel drugs for tumors with splicing alterations.
She is the Principal Investigator on four major grants (NCI R01, NIGMS R01, NCI R21/R33, and a Hevolution Foundation Advancing Geroscience Efforts Award) which support her unique program’s integrative research approach, which connects the fields of RNA biology, cancer research, and aging to reveal novel avenues for mechanistic discovery and new personalized cancer therapies. She is a member of the RNA Society and the American Association for Cancer Research, and member of the AACR Task Force on Aging and Cancer. She co-organized multiple international conferences, including the FASEB RNA Processing in Cancer Conference: From Bench to Bedside (2023), the Forbeck Forum on Therapeutic Targeting of mRNA splicing in Cancer (2023), and the JAX Long read sequencing workshop (2024). She serves or has served on NIH study sections and peer review groups in the US and abroad, in addition to reviewing manuscripts for a range of leading journals. She is also dynamically engaged in the research community, in the training of the next generation of cancer researchers, and in science outreach programs.
