Anindya Bagchi, Ph.D.

I am an Associate Professor at Sanford Burnham Prebys (SBP) Medical Discovery Institute. My lab has engaged in several ‘high-risk high reward’ projects which have led to pioneering discoveries that directly led to new areas of research within cancer biology. I am focused on the functional genomics of cancer, with emphasis on elucidating the implications of genomic copy number alterations in cancer (Methods Mol Biol. 2019, 1907:197-212). During my postdoctoral research at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, I discovered a novel tumor suppressor gene, Chromodomain helicase DNA binding protein 5 (CHD5), which maps in human chromosome 1p36. This work solved a decades-old problem of identifying a tumor suppressor at Hu1p36 (Cell, 2007; 128:459-475). Before joining SBP, I was a tenured faculty at the University of Minnesota where I worked on a key genomic copy number alteration that was found in many human cancers, the copy gain of Human 8q24. My group uncovered the role of a long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) PVT1 that is co-gained with, and regulates MYC activity in the 8q24+ cancers (Tseng et al, Nature, 2014, 512:82-86). We also study the underlying mechanism contributing to the metastasis and poor outcome of pancreatic adenocarcinoma and have recently identified PPP1R1B, a regulator of phosphoprotein phosphatase 1 (PPP1) as a key driver of metastasis in pancreatic cancer (Tiwari et al, Gastroenterology 2020;159:1882-1897, highlighted on the cover of the November 2020 issue of the journal).