What are we up to?
What are we up to?
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In The Hoya: GU Medical Professors Publish New Research on Brain Cancer Treatment
In The Hoya: GU Medical Professors Publish New Research on Brain Cancer Treatment
January 16th, 2026
Method Developed to Identify Best Treatment Combinations for Glioblastoma Based on Unique Cellular Targets
Method Developed to Identify Best Treatment Combinations for Glioblastoma Based on Unique Cellular Targets
January 7th, 2026
scFOCAL - Published in Nature Communications
scFOCAL - Published in Nature Communications
January 7th, 2026
Happy New Year! Now in print at Nature Communications, our new pharmacotranscriptomics platform scFOCAL leverages single-cell RNA sequencing data of patient glioblastoma tumors with the NIH LINCS L1000 dataset to predict the tumor cell states that are sensitive or resistant to different small molecule therapeutics.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67783-5
Using this concept of single-cell and drug connectivity, we developed an algorithm to identify combination therapies that synergize by maximizing drug discordance across the heterogeneous GBM cell landscape, and validated it by demonstrating the synergistic combination of Olig2 inhibition and treatment with the antibody-drug conjugate Depatux-M, of which each is predicted to target unique GBM cell transcriptional states.
scFOCAL is available as an R package at www.github.com/AyadLab/scFOCAL
Check out the official press release on MedicalXpress here: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-algorithm-drugs-glioblastoma-diverse-cell.html
OrthologAL - Published in Bioinformatics
OrthologAL - Published in Bioinformatics
May 20th, 2025
Now in print at Bioinformatics (Oxford), our new Shiny app OrthologAL leverages BiomaRt to automate the conversion of non-human single-cell and spatial transcriptomics datasets to human orthologs in the context of Seurat objects, to simplify the preparation of data for our pharmacotranscriptomics workflows.
Importantly, OrthologAL also automates the analysis of dual-species datasets, such as those from cancer xenograft models.
Check the application note out at: https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/41/6/btaf311/8138378
Find the OrthologAL R package at: https://github.com/AyadLab/OrthologAL
scFOCAL in Pre-Print
scFOCAL in Pre-Print
May 15th, 2025
Now on BiorXiv, we introduce a novel pharmacotranscriptomics tool, scFOCAL, that leverages the integration of transcriptional drug response signatures from the NIH Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS) L1000 dataset with single-cell RNA sequencing data of glioblastoma tumors to predict which cells that are sensitive or resistant to different treatments. Importantly, we show that this tool can be used to identify more effective therapeutic combinations that target broader populations of tumor cells.
Read the pre-print here
2025 Undergraduate Research Conference
2025 Undergraduate Research Conference
April 15th, 2025
Pravallika Palwai (GU School of Public Health '26) presented her research dissecting PDAC intratumor heterogeneity and cell-cell interactions at the 2025 Undergraduate Research Symposium. Pravallika was one of only three students chosen to share her work in an oral presentation. Congratulations Pravallika!
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