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Marcin Cieslik Receives Award from Bristol-Myers Squibb

Marcin Cieslik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pathology and Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics and member of the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology (MCTP), received an award from Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) for the project entitled, “Identification of novel therapeutic vulnerabilities across immunophenotypes of refractory and metastatic tumors." This award provides two years of funding.

Dr. Cieslik will be working with BMS colleague Dr. Rohit Malik (former MCTP researcher) as part of a collaborative research program, to identify novel molecular subtypes of cancers and their predicted drug-sensitivity characteristics. They hypothesize that differences in outcomes between metastatic patients are partially explained by their associations with distinct immunological subtypes, and that progression from primary to metastatic disease is associated with a shift towards immune evasive genetic subtypes.

The overarching objective of this research is to: (i) comprehensively characterize immune phenotypes of metastatic tumors, (ii) to identify genomic features associated with immune cell infiltration, and (iii) to determine whether immune genotypes or phenotypes are associated with outcomes. They also propose to leverage DepMap in order to identify cell-line avatars, and potential treatment opportunities, for immune evasive subtypes.