Detail

Keywords

Carbohydrate Metabolism; Cell Biology; Glycolysis; Inflammation; Macrophage Activation; Metabolic Networks and Pathways; Molecular Biology; Multimodal Imaging; Pentose Phosphate Pathway; Tumor Markers, Biological

Research interests

Dr. Haschemi explores biochemical pathways and investigates metabolic reprogramming in cells to ultimately understand their functional and physiological consequences. He significantly contributed to further develop the research field now known as “immunometabolism” by characterizing for the first time stimulus-specific metabolic fluxes in macrophages and by revealing a novel carbohydrate kinase Shpk (aka CARKL) as key metabolic regulator of carbohydrate metabolism (Haschemi et al. CellMetab 2012). In ongoing studies, he is focusing on immunometabolism and cancer metabolism. His research aims to disentangle molecular mechanisms regulating the interface of glycolysis and the pentose phosphate pathway, and cellular effector functions in various human diseases like atherosclerosis and cancer. To achieve this, they make use of biochemical and molecular approaches, mouse genetics, clinical samples and even develop new methods or tools to enable groundbreaking insights into human biology and medicine. To overcome current limitations in metabolic research, his lab recently developed the first metabolic profiling tool to investigate single-cell metabolism in intact tissue microenvironments (Miller et al. CellMetab 2017, cover-featured).

Main Research Interests:

• Identify regulatory mechanism at the interfaces of cellular metabolism and physiology
• Elucidate metabolic reprogramming in immune and cancer cells
• Translate basic research to human medicine

Techniques, methods & infrastructure

His laboratory has strong expertise in biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology research and is fully equipped for cell and organ culture, cloning, PCR, recombinant protein production/purification, quantitative and qualitative small molecule analysis, biochemical assays, histology, imaging, FACS, various cell-based assays like gene targeting and licenses for various bioinformatics software tools. The Vectra Polaris Automated Quantitative Pathology Imaging System (Perkin-Elmer) is used to integrate both multispectral imaging and automated slide scanning to visualize, analyze, quantify, and phenotype single cells in situ. His group develops and utilizes mouse models to study carbohydrate metabolism in vivo. Moreover, in an ongoing collaboration with the Department of Surgery they obtain unused primary human material from adult organ donors to investigate carbohydrate metabolism in humans. They have access to next generation sequencing equipment and the department’s state-of-the art mass-spectrometry instruments.

Selected publications

1. Miller, A. et al., 2017. Exploring Metabolic Configurations of Single Cells within Complex Tissue Microenvironments. Cell Metabolism, 26(5), pp.788–800.e6. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2017.08.014.
2. Nagy, C. & Haschemi, A., 2015. Time and Demand are Two Critical Dimensions of Immunometabolism: The Process of Macrophage Activation and the Pentose Phosphate Pathway. Frontiers in Immunology, 6. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2015.00164.
3. Nagy, C. & Haschemi, A., 2013. Sedoheptulose kinase regulates cellular carbohydrate metabolism by sedoheptulose 7-phosphate supply. Biochemical Society Transactions, 41(2), pp.674–680. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1042/BST20120354.
4. Haschemi, A. et al., 2012. The Sedoheptulose Kinase CARKL Directs Macrophage Polarization through Control of Glucose Metabolism. Cell Metabolism, 15(6), pp.813–826. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2012.04.023.