UT Health SA Newsroom: Greehey cancer researcher receives UT System’s Rising STARs award

April 10, 2019

David Libich, PhD, assistant professor of biochemistry and structural biology in the Long School of Medicine and faculty member of UT Health’s Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute, has received a Rising STARs Award from the UT System. The award for early-career investigators comes with a $250,000 grant. Dr. Libich, who began work here in 2017, […]


Nature: Study cancer survivors

April 9, 2019

More and more people are living for years after treatment. Researchers should look for ways to identify and ease long-term effects. When Gregory Aune was 16, he wasn’t particularly concerned about the lasting effects of the drugs and radiation that he was given to treat his lymphoma. “I saw kids around me die, so I […]





Nature Communications: MiR-584-5p potentiates vincristine and radiation response by inducing spindle defects and DNA damage in medulloblastoma

October 31, 2018

Nourhan Abdelfattah, Subapriya Rajamanickam, Subbarayalu Panneerdoss, Santosh Timilsina, Pooja Yadav, Benjamin C. Onyeagucha, Michael Garcia, Ratna Vadlamudi, Yidong Chen, Andrew Brenner, Peter Houghton & Manjeet K. Rao Abstract Despite improvements in overall survival, only a modest percentage of patients survive high-risk medulloblastoma. The devastating side effects of radiation and chemotherapy substantially reduce the quality of life for surviving patients. Here, using genomic screens, we identified miR-584-5p as a […]


Elife: tp53 deficiency causes a wide tumor spectrum and increases embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma metastasis in zebrafish

September 7, 2018

Myron S Ignatius # 1 2 3 4, Madeline N Hayes # 1 2 3, Finola E Moore 1 2 3, Qin Tang 1 2 3, Sara P Garcia 1, Patrick R Blackburn 5, Kunal Baxi 4, Long Wang 4, Alexander Jin 1, Ashwin Ramakrishnan 1, Sophia Reeder 1, Yidong Chen 4, Gunnlaugur Petur Nielsen 1 2, Eleanor Y Chen 6, Robert P Hasserjian 1 2, Franck Tirode 7, Stephen C Ekker 8, David M Langenau 1 2 3 Abstract The TP53 tumor-suppressor gene is mutated in >50% of human tumors and Li-Fraumeni patients with germline inactivation are predisposed to developing cancer. Here, we generated tp53 deleted […]


eLife: tp53 deficiency causes a wide tumor spectrum and increases embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma metastasis in zebrafish

September 7, 2018

Myron S Ignatius, Madeline N Hayes, Finola E Moore, Qin Tang, Sara P Garcia, Patrick R Blackburn, Kunal Baxi, Long Wang, Alexander Jin, Ashwin Ramakrishnan, Sophia Reeder, Yidong Chen, Gunnlaugur Petur Nielsen, Eleanor Y Chen, Robert P Hasserjian, Franck Tirode, Stephen C Ekker, David M Langenau  Abstract The TP53 tumor-suppressor gene is mutated in >50% of human tumors and Li-Fraumeni patients with germline inactivation are predisposed to developing cancer. Here, we generated tp53 deleted […]



Nature Genetics: Discordant inheritance of chromosomal and extrachromosomal DNA elements contributes to dynamic disease evolution in glioblastoma

April 23, 2018

Ana C deCarvalho 1, Hoon Kim 2, Laila M Poisson 3, Mary E Winn 4, Claudius Mueller 5, David Cherba 4, Julie Koeman 6, Sahil Seth 7, Alexei Protopopov 7, Michelle Felicella 8, Siyuan Zheng 9, Asha Multani 10, Yongying Jiang 7, Jianhua Zhang 7, Do-Hyun Nam 11 12 13, Emanuel F Petricoin 5, Lynda Chin 7 9, Tom Mikkelsen 14 15, Roel G W Verhaak 16 Abstract To understand how genomic heterogeneity of glioblastoma (GBM) contributes to poor therapy response, we performed DNA and RNA sequencing on GBM samples and the neurospheres and orthotopic xenograft […]