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Growth signals are transmitted by diverse and redundant mechanisms. This redundancy is needed for tissue specific regulation of cell growth, but also makes it challenging to block growth signalling in cancer cells. Although signal transduction has been studied a lot, it is inadequately understood how the growth signal pathways interface with conserved processes of cell growth. My aim is to identify and characterize common dependencies of proliferating cancer cells. To achieve this, I am manipulating proliferation and pathway usage in different cancer cell types, and collecting data using phosphoproteomics, thermal proteome profiling, single-cell RNAseq, and targeted genome editing based dropout screens.

I am interested in the regulation of cellular processes by transcription factors, and especially, how aberrant transcriptional pathways promote tumorigenesis. My main project focuses on studying the transcriptional targets of the MYC oncogene and their role in regulating cell growth and proliferation.To this end, I am using modern experimental methods in mammalian cells, such as CRISPR/Cas9-based precision genome editing and genome-wide screening approaches, to study the functional relationship between transcription factor binding, gene expression, and cell proliferation.

I joined Taipale group in Cambridge on Jun 2018 with a background in synthetic biology. My current research interest is regulatory characterisation of high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGS-OvCA) cell lines to understand the molecular mechanisms behind ovarian cancer. I have utilized different technologies to achieve this goal, such as ATI/EMSA-seq (to reveal the main transcriptional regulators of HGS-OvCA), CRISPR/Cas9 screening (to identify a set of transcription factors that are necessary for the growth of the ovarian cancer cell lines) and CUT&RUN (characterise the TFs which are main transcriptional regulators or relevant to chemoresistance of HGS-OvCA).