HFSP Post Doctoral Fellow

Experimental Cancer Research

Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (Lausanne, Switzerland)

Damon Runyon Post Doctoral Fellow

Cancer Metabolism

Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA)

Douglas Hanahan, Lewis C. Cantley, Peter G. Schultz

Chemical methods to reprogram cell fate

My research focuses on the identification and characterization of chemicals that can reprogram a cell's differentiation capacity. In particular, together with my colleagues at TSRI, we found that histone deacetylation is responsible for maintaining the lineage identity of oligodendrocyte precursor cells, where pharmacological inhibition of histone deacetylase activity reverts precursor cells back to the multipotent stem state. More recently, in collaboration with the Jaensich lab at MIT, Costas and colleagues have developed a small molecule screening platform that is being used to identify chemical complements for the reprogramming factors that induce pluripotency in somatic cells. Implementation of this strategy has led to the identification of compounds that can replace the reprogramming factors Sox2 and Klf4. Current and future efforts with these compounds have begun to unravel the mechanisms at play during epigenome overhaul and may ultimately lead to the identification of a cocktail of small molecules that can convert somatic cells back to the pluripotent state.