At the Center for OncoGenomics and Innovative Therapeutics (COGIT), our goal is to provide a platform for precision oncology drug discovery, using innovative multi-omic approaches to understand the basic mechanism of cell plasticity and identify innovative therapeutics.
Cancer cells can hijack normal cell fate trajectories and promote epigenetic reprogramming to promote their growth and avoid clearance by the immune system. The advancement of sequencing technologies is now ripe to interrogate these cell fate switches at a single cell level to understand clonal dynamics. From a therapeutic standpoint, blocking or exploiting such switching mechanisms could prevent tumor recurrence and eliminate therapy-resistant cells. Precision therapies currently available in the market target upstream regulators of signaling cascades (i.e. receptor tyrosine kinases, metabolic enzymes). However, the rewiring in cell signaling and the epigenetic switching of cell identity often limit their clinical success.
To overcome these limitations, we hypothesize that understanding the transcriptional networks and chromatin dependencies underlying different types of cellular plasticity and caused by unique oncogenic driver events (i.e. MYC-overexpression, CTNNB1 gain-of-function, APC-loss), is crucial to enable new therapeutic strategies to target metastasis and resistance to therapy.
Our Goals
The Center for OncoGenomics and Innovative Therapeutics is broadly focused on the characterization of the genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomics alterations that contribute to the initiation and progression of cancer. We use advanced genomic and transcriptomics sequencing technologies, coupled with phenotypic screenings and bioinformatics tools to identify innovative therapeutic opportunities in oncology.
We are committed to adopting innovative technologies and to implementing new ideas that push the boundaries of our current understanding of how a cancer cell can change its cell state to become resistant to treatment.
We are dedicated to advancing innovative precision therapeutics in oncology and will leverage our extensive network of collaborators to identify lead small molecule compounds and degraders. Additionally, we are poised to explore the uncharted opportunities presented by RNA therapeutics.
Meet Our Team
The Center for OncoGenomics and Innovative Therapeutics (COGIT) is led by Ernesto Guccione, PhD.
COGIT Investigators and Staff
Principal Investigator and Unit Leaders:
Ernesto Guccione, PhD (Director)
Slim Mzoughi, PhD (Leader, Cell State Targeting Unit)
Kevin Mohammed, PhD (Leader, Multi Omics Innovation Unit)
Staff, Post Docs and Students
Alexander Rialdi, PhD (Instructor)
Scott Tyler, PhD (Instructor)
Habiba Zorgati, PhD (Postdoc)
Yi Li, PhD (Lab Manager)
Denis Torre (Graduate Student)
Megan Schwarz (Graduate Student)
Elisa Arceci (Graduate Student)
Nesteen Param (Graduate Student)
Frank Fonseca (Graduate Student)
Kensey Portman (Master’s Student)
Angie Ramirez (Master’s Student)
Collaborating Investigators
Ivan Marazzi, PhD
University of California, Irvine
Daniel Messerschmidt, PhD
University of Copenhagen
Tiziana Bonaldi, PhD
European Institute of Oncology, Milan, Italy
Jordi Ochando, PhD
Icahn Mount Sinai
Jian Jin, PhD
Icahn Mount Sinai
Arvin Dar, PhD
Memorial Sloan Kettering
Jean-Christophe Marine, PhD
VIB-KU, Leuven, BelgiumMark Dawson, MBBS, PhD
Peter MacCallum
Cancer Center, Melbourne, Australia
Dave Keng Boon Wee
IMCB, A*STAR, Singapore