Charalampos Lazaris
Expert II, Oncology Data Science at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR)
Charalampos Lazaris
Α work that may pave the way for novel therapeutic approaches in T-ALL leukemia.
Charalampos Lazaris is an Expert II in Oncology Data Science at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) in Cambridge, MA. He has a dual background in Molecular and Computational Biology, and holds an Integrated Master’s degree in Applied Biology & Biotechnology (University of Ioannina), a Master’s degree in Molecular Biology-Biomedicine (University of Crete), and a Master’s degree in Bioinformatics (University of Edinburgh, UK). He earned his doctoral degree in Systems and Computational Biomedicine from the New York University School of Medicine, where he was co-mentored by Professors Aristotelis Tsirigos and Iannis Aifantis.
During his PhD, he worked on computational methods to elucidate the three-dimensional (3D) genome structure and how it is affected by cellular transformation. He developed HiC-bench, one of the most comprehensive computational pipelines for the analysis of genome-wide chromatin-chromatin interaction (Hi-C) data (1). He also co-led a project where he and his team used machine-learning approaches to improve Hi-C reproducibility (2). In addition, he co-first authored a study where they demonstrated a direct link between oncogenic and non-oncogenic addiction in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL). With his team, they showed that NOTCH1, a major oncogenic factor in T-ALL, hijacks stress response by regulating various heat-shock genes, sustaining the increased anabolic requirements of leukemic cells (3). This work may pave the way for novel therapeutic approaches in T-ALL leukemia.
As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern California (USC), he used computational approaches to detect actionable mutations in cancer patients. He then worked as a Bioinformatics Scientist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, an MIT affiliate. During this time, Charalampos Lazaris collaborated with experts from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to investigate how multiple myeloma cells become dependent on certain transcription factors for their survival. Currently, as an Expert II at NIBR, he further explores transcriptional cancer vulnerabilities to contribute to the development of new therapeutic modalities.
Bibliography:
- Lazaris C., et al. BMC Genomics 18, 22 (2017).
- Gong, Y. et al. Nat. Commun. 9, 542 (2018).
- Kourtis, N. et al. Nat. Med. 24, 1157–1166 (2018).
