Detail

Keywords

Drug Combinations; Drug Discovery; Drug Screening Assays, Antitumor; Hematologic Neoplasms; High-Throughput Screening Assays; Individualized Medicine; Leukemia; Leukemia-Lymphoma, Adult T-Cell; Metabolism; Molecular Targeted Therapy; Personalized Medicine; Signal Transduction; Systems Biology; Translational Medical Research

Research group(s)

• Functional Precision Hematology Group
  Research Area: The lab undertakes basic, translation, and clinical research to advance and develop novel diagnostics and treatment modalities for patients with hematological malignancies.
  Members:
  Tea Pemovska
  Alexander Pichler

Research interests

I am a cancer biologist with a special interest in molecular mechanisms underlying cancer development and progression and how to utilize that information to identify novel therapeutic strategies. I specialize in developing and running high-throughput drug screening of patient-derived cancer cells and associated data analysis. In addition, my work focuses on using drug sensitivity data to unravel disease biology and personalized therapy options for cancer patients, as well as repositioning existing anti-cancer drugs for other indications. My expertise is in translational cancer systems biology, particularly hematology, drug screening, and identification of novel cancer cell vulnerabilities that can be exploited for personalized therapy optimization. My current research interests focus on the identification and characterization of metabolic dependencies in hematological malignancies with compound libraries and understanding underlying disease progression mechanisms in rare hematological cancers such as T-PLL. Furthermore, I am passionate about bringing functional precision medicine through innovative clinical trials.

Techniques, methods & infrastructure

High-throughput flow cytometry-based drug screening; single-cell RNA sequencing; working with patient samples from patients with hematological malignancies; drug libraries; functional precision medicine clinical trials

Selected publications

1. Pemovska, T. et al., 2021. Metabolic drug survey highlights cancer cell dependencies and vulnerabilities. Nature Communications, 12(1). Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27329-x.
2. Kornauth, C. et al. (2021) ‘Functional Precision Medicine Provides Clinical Benefit in Advanced Aggressive Hematologic Cancers and Identifies Exceptional Responders’, Cancer Discovery, 12(2), pp. 372–387. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1158/2159-8290.cd-21-0538.
3. Pemovska, T., Bigenzahn, J.W. & Superti-Furga, G., 2018. Recent advances in combinatorial drug screening and synergy scoring. Current Opinion in Pharmacology, 42, pp.102–110. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.coph.2018.07.008.
4. Pemovska, T. et al., 2015. Axitinib effectively inhibits BCR-ABL1(T315I) with a distinct binding conformation. Nature, 519(7541), pp.102–105. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14119.
5. Pemovska, T. et al., 2013. Individualized Systems Medicine Strategy to Tailor Treatments for Patients with Chemorefractory Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Cancer Discovery, 3(12), pp.1416–1429. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1158/2159-8290.CD-13-0350.