Assistant Professors, Genetics
Drs. Katie Hoadley and Jesse Raab (Assistant Professors, Genetics) received a Team Science Pilot Project Award from the UNC Center for Environmental Health and Susceptibility (CEHS) for their collaborative project titled “Understanding genetic and environmental drivers of primary liver cancer”.
This one-year, $50,000 award will focus on developing methods to characterize the chromatin state in patient samples with a long-term goal of characterizing how mutations and environmental exposures that lead to tumor formation alter chromatin state. They will combine these patient studies with animal models to directly test the tumor driving potential of genes in the context of environmental exposures. To do this they will make use of a novel platform they developed to perform in vivo CRISPR screens in the mouse liver. Together, these studies will lay the foundation necessary to understand the relationship between altered chromatin, environmental stresses, and liver cancer.