Publications

Cancer is a group of complex diseases, with tumor heterogeneity, durable drug efficacy, emerging resistance, and host toxicity presenting major challenges to the development of effective cancer therapeutics. While traditionally used methods have remained limited in their capacity to overcome these challenges in cancer drug development, efforts have been made in recent years toward applying […]

Diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is an aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma and the most frequently diagnosed hematologic malignancy in the United States. DLBCL exhibits significant molecular and clinical heterogeneity, and at least a third of patients are left uncured with standard frontline chemoimmunotherapy. As such, there is a critical need to identify novel targeted therapies […]

Wastewater is a geospatially- and temporally-linked microbial fingerprint of a given population, making it a potentially valuable tool for tracking public health across locales and time. Here, we integrate targeted and bulk RNA sequencing (N = 2238 samples) to track the viral, bacterial, and functional content over geospatially distinct areas within Miami Dade County, USA, […]

Drug-induced gene expression profiles can identify potential mechanisms of toxicity. We focus on obtaining signatures for cardiotoxicity of FDA-approved tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) in human induced-pluripotent-stem-cell-derived cardiomyocytes, using bulk transcriptomic profiles. We use singular value decomposition to identify drug-selective patterns across cell lines obtained from multiple healthy human subjects. Cellular pathways affected by cardiotoxic TKIs […]

TIN-X (Target Importance and Novelty eXplorer) is an interactive visualization tool for illuminating associations between diseases and potential drug targets and is publicly available at newdrugtargets.org. TIN-X uses natural language processing to identify disease and protein mentions within PubMed content using previously published tools for named entity recognition (NER) of gene/protein and disease names. Target […]

STK17A is a novel uncharacterized member of the death-associated protein family of serine and threonine kinases. Overexpression of STK17A is observed in many cancers. We identified a lead compound that is based on a quinazoline core. Optimizations of the lead compound led to the discovery of potent and selective STK17A/B inhibitors with drug-like properties and […]

An important epigenetic component of tyrosine kinase signaling is the phosphorylation of histones, and epigenetic readers, writers, and erasers. Phosphorylation of protein arginine methyltransferases (PRMTs), have been shown to enhance and impair their enzymatic activity. In this study, we show that the hyperactivation of Janus kinase 2 (JAK2) by the V617F mutation phosphorylates tyrosine residues […]

The Illuminating the Druggable Genome (IDG) consortium generated reagents, biological model systems, data, informatic databases, and computational tools. The Resource Dissemination and Outreach Center (RDOC) played a central administrative role, organized internal meetings, fostered collaboration, and coordinated consortium-wide efforts. The RDOC developed and deployed a Resource Management System (RMS) to enable efficient workflows for collecting, […]

Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been utilized to track community infections of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) by detecting RNA of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), within samples collected from wastewater. The correlations between community infections and wastewater measurements of the RNA can potentially change as SARS-CoV-2 evolves into new variations by mutating. This study […]

Deep learning is a machine learning technique to model high-level abstractions in data by utilizing a graph composed of multiple processing layers that experience various linear and non-linear transformations. This technique has been shown to perform well for applications in drug discovery, utilizing structural features of small molecules to predict activity. Here, we report a […]

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Clinical testing has been a vital part of the response to and suppression of the COVID-19 pandemic; however, testing imposes significant burdens on a population. College students had to contend with clinical testing while simultaneously dealing with health risks and the academic pressures brought on by quarantines, changes to virtual platforms, and other disruptions to […]

Wastewater-based surveillance (WBS) is a noninvasive, epidemiological strategy for assessing the spread of COVID-19 in communities. This strategy was based upon wastewater RNA measurements of the viral target, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). The utility of WBS for assessing the spread of COVID-19 has motivated research to measure targets beyond SARS-CoV-2, including pathogens containing […]

COVID-19 remains a severe public health threat despite the WHO declaring an end to the public health emergency in May 2023. Continual development of SARS-CoV-2 variants with resistance to vaccine-induced or natural immunity necessitates constant vigilance as well as new vaccines and therapeutics. Targeted protein degradation (TPD) remains relatively untapped in antiviral drug discovery and […]

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Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) is the standard of care for high risk and advanced prostate cancer; however, disease progression from androgen-dependent prostate cancer (ADPC) to lethal and incurable castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) and (in a substantial minority of cases) neuroendocrine prostate cancer (NEPC) is common. Identifying effective targeted therapies is challenging because of acquired resistance […]

Esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) patients have poor clinical outcomes, with an overall 5-year survival rate of 20%. Smoking is a significant risk factor for EAC. The role of WEE1, a nuclear kinase that negatively regulates the cell cycle in normal conditions, in EAC tumorigenesis and drug resistance is not fully understood. Immunohistochemistry staining shows significant WEE1 […]

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1158/2767-9764.CRC-21-0022.][This corrects the article DOI: 10.1158/2767-9764.CRC-21-0022.].

Methods of wastewater concentration (electronegative filtration (ENF) versus magnetic bead-based concentration (MBC)) were compared for the analysis of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), beta-2 microglobulin, and human-coronavirus OC43. Using ENF as the concentration method, two quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction (qPCR) analytical methods were also compared: Volcano 2^(nd) Generation (V2G)-qPCR and reverse transcriptase (RT)-qPCR measuring […]