Dr. David Cho's intersection with MCP Graduate Student Leads to a New Career Path

Dr. Brian Harry finds the right combination at Michigan

An article recently published by the Nuñez lab provides an exciting discovery for individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and certain other autoimmune diseases caused by aberrant NLRP3. The research, led by Dr. Jie Xu with Drs. Joseph Pickard and Gabriel Nuñez, discovered that a common, safe, FDA-approved drug used to treat alcoholism and cocaine addictions, disulfiram, inhibits the production of NLRP3 inflammasomes. When NLRP3 is activated, it can cause inflammation leading to multiple health issues.

With 20 subtypes of Renal Cell Carcinoma (RCC) listed by the World Health Organization in 2022, determining the specific type of RCC and the correct treatment protocol for patients can be daunting. Only seven of the 20 subtypes had been defined by specific molecular changes and the 20% of RCCs that are classified as non-clear cell RCCs (non-ccRCC), were primarily identified only by histopathologic features. The driving genetic changes had not been identified. A large multi-institutional team making up the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium, including several researchers from Michigan Medicine’s Department of Pathology, performed multi-omics data analysis on 48 non-ccRCC and 103 ccRCC tumors as well as 101 normal adjacent tissues to study the genetic aberrations found in these tumor types. The findings of this research were recently published in Cell Reports Medicine, with Pathology’s Drs. Alexey Nesvizhskii and Saravana Mohan Dhanasekaran as senior authors and Dr. Ginny Xiaohe Li as first author.

The MCP team is proud to share the news that MCP student Gabrielle "Gabbi" Rozumek is the recipient of the 2024 Phyllis M. Wise Biomedical Sciences Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Service.

Gabbi is very passionate about and dedicated to serving her community. Since 2016, she has touched so many lives by serving in numerous and various capacities. A few of her efforts include:

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from across Michigan Medicine are focused on cutting-edge research to understand and address food allergies as members of the Mary H. Weiser Food Allergy Center. Nicholas Lukacs, PhD, the Godfrey Dorr Stobbe Professor of Pathology and Scientific Director of the Mary H. Weiser Food Allergy Center, and James R. Baker Jr., Ruth Dow Doan Professor of Biologic Nanotechnology and Director of the MHWFAC, were instrumental in founding the food allergy center in 2015 and in recruiting an exceptional team of researchers to the Center. One of their goals since the inception of the MHWFAC was to see it become recognized as one of the world’s elite research centers in its field. Recently, this goal was achieved when the National Institutes of Health awarded them one of just 10 seven-year CoFAR Cooperative Agreement Grants, recognizing the center’s exceptional ground-breaking research.

Dr. Gabriel Nunez 's Lab Makes Breakthrough Discovery in Colitis

A Global REACH seed grant aims to bridge stem cell biology and cutting-edge 3D retinal organoid technology to inform new research of childhood diseases that cause blindness.

Rajesh C. Rao, M.D., Leonard G. Miller Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, and Associate Professor of Human Genetics and Pathology, is a retina surgeon and physician-scientist. He garnered a $10,000 Partnership Development Grant last fall to collaborate with colleagues at the Ege University Faculty of Medicine, in Turkey, where the team was treating a very unique patient.

“This is just one of those needle-in-a-haystack situations. The disease the patient was suffering from, Strømme Syndrome, is so incredibly rare,” Rao said. “I’m really grateful that Global REACH [...]

Crohn’s disease (CD), one of the major forms of Inflammatory Bowel Disease, is a chronic relapsing intestinal disorder that affects millions of people globally. The cause of CD is unknown, but it is thought to result from a dysregulated immune response against environmental factors, including intestinal microbes, in genetically susceptible hosts.

The critical role that the intestinal microorganisms, collectively known as the gut microbiota, plays in the pathogenesis of CD has been investigated over the past two decades. Given the importance of the gut microbiota in triggering CD, the development of therapeutic approaches that target disease-causing intestinal microbes may provide a unique approach to the treatment of this disease [...]

A week-long, all-expenses-paid trip to Ann Arbor, Michigan in late Spring may sound too good to be true, but for 30 fortunate undergraduate students from around the United States and its territories, this becomes a reality when they are accepted into the annual Developing Future Biologists (DFB) short course.

After several decades of hard work by many scientists at the University of Michigan Medical School and elsewhere, an antibody (anti-C5a) has just been approved by the US FDA for treatment of humans who are septic and have developed lung infections with COVID-19, resulting in severe pulmonary dysfunction requiring external lung support. The antibody, anti-C5a, was originally developed in the Dr. Peter Ward laboratory in the early 2000s. The mAb was shown to dramatically reduce lung infections in polymicrobial sepsis in mice. 

A recently published research study led by Drs. Sem Phan and Tianju Liu from the Department of Pathology reported new findings that could help scientists predict disease progression and suggest a new immunotherapy target for the treatment of IPF and other fibrotic lung diseases.

These findings uncovered a new role for the immune checkpoint marker (B7-H3) in lung fibrosis that can potentially serve as a novel target for immunotherapy to slow down or abort the progression of lung fibrosis in patients with IPF and other chronic lung fibrotic diseases. In addition, sB7H3 levels in the plasma could serve as a potential marker to predict how quickly the disease progresses in patients and assess responsiveness to therapy, allowing for more informed treatment decisions.

Giving Blueday, March 15, 2023

The Department of Pathology offers the Molecular and Cellular Pathology Graduate Program (MCP) for students who are interested in translational research – the step between basic science research and clinical care, the “bench-to-bedside” transition. Sahiti Marella is a graduate student in the MCP who was recently awarded her first F31 grant. This is an NIH-funded predoctoral grant that provides awardees with a monthly stipend to support tuition and fees, and funds for training-related costs while they conduct their PhD research project, for up to five-years of funding.

Hsiang-Yu (David) Hu, a Molecular and Cellular Pathology graduate student in the lab of Dr. Andrew Muntean recently published his first first-authored article in Leukemia.

At Michigan Medicine, many of our faculty serve across multiple departments, which opens up opportunities for students to also experience not just Pathology, but also other disciplines. The Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics is one of the departments with which several of our Pathology faculty and students collaborate. In honor of the UN International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the DCMB featured one of our joint students as shared below.

Congratulations are due to Dr. Asma Nusrat, F. Peyton Rous Professor of Experimental Pathology and Director of Experimental Pathology, and Dr. Charles Parkos, Carl V. Weller Professor and Chair of Pathology, on being named 2022 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows. The AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals. The 2022 class was comprised of 505 scientists, engineers and innovators from around the world and across all disciplines.  Being selected as an AAAS Fellow is one of the most distinguished honors within the scientific community. The newly elected Fellows are being recognized for their scientific and socially notable achievements spanning their careers.

The laboratory of Dr. Chang Kim, recently published a high-impact study that elucidates the bone marrow niche and mechanisms by which innate lymphoid cells differentiate between those which remain in the bone marrow and those which emigrate to the rest of the body.  Read more[...]

As the SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to mutate over time and new booster vaccines become available, the question arises, are the multivalent boosters more effective at improving immune response than the monovalent vaccines with which we began? This question was addressed by a multi-site group from Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (New York) and from the University of Michigan Medical School Department of Pathology. Drs. Riccardo Valdez, Carmen Gherasim, and Aubree Gordon represented the Immunity Associated with SARS-CoV-2 (IASO) research team at U-M[...]

The inaugural Research Track Faculty Symposium will be held on Thursday, March 23rd, 2023. Abstract submission deadline is Friday, December 16th. 

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Walk through a 30-year career with Dr. Gabriel Nunez--highlighting his key discoveries, perspectives on work/life balance, and those he mentored.

A research team from the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology undertook a study to illustrate how careful assessment of cytologic and biomarker features may provide physicians with information on Metastatic Prostatic Cancer (MCP) patients’ prognosis and the best therapies to consider [...]

The Research Scientist Track

...and what do they do?

Dr. Richard Miller candidly describes his career progression in aging research.

This month marked the usual United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology (USCAP)'s Annual Meeting. This year's hybrid-style event, the 11th annual, was held both in-person and virtually in Los Angeles, California from March 18-24, 2022. The symposium featured several short and long courses, as well evening specialty conferences and ticketed seminars. The conference also included numerous poster sessions, live Q&A segments, and a multitude of social events [...]

Meet the members of the Research Administration team within the Department.

Reflections on the Future of Pathology

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which also awards the Nobel Prizes, announced today that Arul Chinnaiyan, MD, PhD, S.P. Hicks Professor of Pathology and Urology at Michigan Medicine and Director of the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology, has been selected as [...]

Congratulations to Chelsea Phillips, a graduate student in the Neurosciences graduate program, mentored by Dr. Anuska Andjelkovic-Zochowski, for two honors received on her work [...]  

Research from INHERET was just published in the Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (JNCCN). Learn more about this study, which analyzes the implementation of InheRET's online tool that provides information about family history as it relates to cancer risks [...]

 A multi-institutional study led by Drs. Alex Taylor, Noah Brown and Rohit Mehra from the Department of Pathology was just published in European Urology's Open Science. Learn more about the resarch, which focuses on how TERT promoter mutations were characterized in urinary tract lesions, which may be considered as precursors to neoplasia at this site [...]

A chromatin degrader stops transcription factors from driving cancer, which may serve as a potential treatment approach for over 90% of prostate cancers.

As COVID closed down research labs, researchers shifted focus.

A study related to the maternal gut microbiome and how it regulates immunity to respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections in offspring was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. Clinical experts from the Department of Pathology including Drs. Wendy Fonseca, Nicholas Lukacs, and Catherine Ptaschinski were responsible for carrying out this study [...]

Research pertaining to Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) and cutaneous neuroendocrine carcinomas was just published in the latest edition of Modern Pathology. Led by the team of Drs. Paul Harms, May Chan, Aaron Udager, Rajiv Patel, and more [...]

Congratulations to Molecular and Cellular Pathology Graduate Student Siva Kumar Natarajan on being awarded the Mistletoe Research Fellowship (MRF).  Established in 2018, the Momental Foundation awards 20 MRF positions to exceptional postdoctoral fellows and advanced PhD candidates from the United States, Japan, and Singapore.

Activity of the polycomb repressive complex 1 is essential for the development and maintenance of leukemic cells; disrupting it presents a new potential therapeutic approach. Leukemia stem cells are rare cells that can renew themselves while continuing to generate malignant cells known as leukemic blasts. These cells are difficult to eradicate using chemotherapy drugs and frequently lead to recurrence of leukemia [...]

Research from the Department of Pathology was just published in the Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Learn more about this publication, which highlights GI samples from COVID-19 patients, led by Dr. Maria Westerhoff [...]

A research effort by Drs. Jolanta Grembecka and Tomasz Cierpicki was just published in Nature Communications. Learn more about the protein made by the ASH1L gene, which plays a key role in the development of acute leukemia, along with other diseases [...]

Research from the Department's Lombard Lab was just published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The study, which focuses on how the deacylase SIRT5 compound supports melanoma viability by influencing chromatin dynamics, was led by Dr. Lombard [...]

Learn more about pathologists' attitudes toward patient interactions in this new publication, led by Dr. Cathryn Lapedis.

A new publication from the Department of Pathology, led by Dr. Kathleen Cho, was just published in the American Association for Cancer Research's flagship journal. highlights how altering the microbiome within a mouse model of oviductal high-grade serious carcinoma can inhibit tumorigeneis [...]

A new study, led by U-M graduate in molecular and cellular pathology Dr. Andi Cani, was just published in European Urology Oncology. The publication focuses on the development of a whole-urine, multiplexed, next-generation RNA-sequencing assay that is used for the early detection of aggressive forms of prostate cancer [...]

Research by Drs. Ann Laszczyk and the Department of Pathology's Dr. Gregory Dressler was just published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. The study focuses on PAX2 proteins and their effects on kidney function and development.

Research team discovered that proteins with the capacity to multimerize quickly responded to osmotic changes (dehydration) caused by high saline or sugar concentrations, condensing into aggregates resembling processing bodies (P-bodies). The reaction, known as hyperosmotic phase separation, or HOPS, takes only a few seconds and is reversible within less than 2 minutes [...]

A series of sophisticated processes are required in the development of innate lymphoid cells (ILC) for them to reach maturity. The Kim laboratory discovered that basic leucine zipper ATF-like transcription factor (Batf) regulates the production of ILC progenitors in the bone marrow as well as the maintenance of ILCs in the periphery. These cells are strategically distributed in peripheral tissues to provide important innate immunity to fight pathogens such as pathogenic viruses and bacteria.

A new publication, generated by Department of Pathology faculty members Drs. Aaron Udager and Scott Tomlins was successfully published in European Urology. The research highlights a longitudinal cohort study centered around the serial molecular profiling of low-grade prostate cancer in order to better assess tumor upgrading [...]

A new study by the University of Michigan's Rogel Cancer Center analyzed patients with cancer and the factors that cause the cancer to spread to the liver, leading to worse outcomes. 

Clinical trials underway are testing whether drugs that target the androgen receptor – successful in controlling prostate cancer – could also work against the coronavirus. wo proteins, ACE2 and TMPRSS2, help the coronavirus gain entry and replicate within cells. TMPRSS2 is well-known to Arul Chinnaiyan, MD, PhD. His lab discovered that TMPRSS2 fuses with the ETS gene to drive more than half of all prostate cancers [...]

A new study led by Drs. Jolanta Grembecka and Tomasz Cierpicki of the Department of Pathology was just published in Blood's American Society of Hematology. The research focuses on combinatorial treatment with menin and FLT3 and how inhibitors induce complete remission in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with activating FLT3 mutations [...]

New research by the Department of Pathology was recently published in Modern Pathology. The study, led by Drs. Aaron Udager, Noah Brown, Bryan Betz, Jonathan McHugh and Scott Tomlins, focuses on how TP53 mutations and CDKN2A mutations and deletions are highly recurrent molecular alterations within malignant progression of sinonasal papilomas [...]

Congratulations to Dr. Celina Kleer who was awarded the American Society for Investigative Pathology (ASIP)'s 2020 Outstanding Investigator Award. Dr. Kleer receives the award for her demonstrated excellence in research in experimental pathology [...]

Research by the Department of Pathology's Drs. Richard Miller and Joseph Endicott was just published in the Journal of Cell Biology. The study focuses on the inhibition of class I PI3K and how it enhances chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA) [...]

Experts from the Department of Pathology's Phlebotomy Team were featured on Michigan Medicine's "The Wrap" podcast. The podcast focuses on the department's Poke Plan Program at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, an initiative that helps to alleviate pain and fear among children during the blood draw process [...]

10:00 am EST

Join us for a virtual event featuring the Department of Pathology's Dr. Celina Kleer, who will host a discussion related to her experiences in understanding breast cancer and her journey as a physician-scientist.

Register Now

11:30 am EST

Join us for a virtual event featuring the Department of Pathology's Dr. Arul Chinnaiyan, who will give the 2020 American Society for Investigative Pathology (ASIP)'s Rous-Whipple Award Lecture. 

Register Here

New research from the Department of Pathology and Dr. Alexandra Hristov was just published in the Journal of Cutaneous Pathology. The study focuses on the kappa and lambda immunohistochemistry in situ hybridization of atypical cutaneous lymphoid infiltrates. 

Structural biology techniques helped researchers target the nuclear receptor-binding SET domain family, whose malfunction is associated with several types of cancer.

Research from Dr. Analisa Difeo was just published in Nature Communications. The study focuses on miR-181a and how it initiates and perpetuates oncogenic transformation through the regulation of innate immune signaling [...]

The protein Argonaute 2 was found to be critical to the progression from benign lesions into pancreatic cancer, suggesting a therapeutic opportunity.

Researchers have uncovered the gene signature for ChRCC.

The event showcased experiemental pathology research.

Event showcases clinical and translational research.

A Phase I clinical trial, using a structurally related analog of the compound, is currently enrolling patients.

U-M researchers are shedding new light with exciting implications for research and health.

Chan Chung, PhD, received two grants in funding from the ChadTough Foundation and Defeat DIPG foundation ($150,000) and the Robert Connor Dawes CERN Pediatric Fellowship ($100,000). [...]

All faculty who serve as the Principal Investigator or one of the key personnel on an NIH award or pending proposal are required to review their new guidance and address the two parts below, as appropriate, by January 20, 2020 [...]

The National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Fellow Transition (F99/K00) Award supports outstanding PhD and other Research Doctoral candidates who complete their dissertation research training (F99 phase) and transition in a timely manner to mentored, cancer-focused postdoctoral career development research positions (K00 phase). [...]

Mark Schultz, PhD, and Andrew Lieberman MD, PhD, have published “Synthetic high-density lipoprotein nanoparticles for the treatment of Niemann–Pick diseases” in BMC Medicine. [...]

Carrie-Anne Malinczak, PhD successfully defended her thesis entitled “Long-Term Immune System Alterations Following Early-Life RSV Infection” on October 21, 2019. Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a ubiquitous human pathogen, infects nearly all children by age two. Severe RSV bronchiolitis in infancy is strongly correlated with the development of recurrent wheezing later in childhood [...]

Department faculty outreach to high school students to educate about careers in medicine and research.

Surinder Kumar, Ph.D., has received The Pablove Foundation Childhood Cancer Research Grant for his proposal entitled “The sirtuin SIRT5 as a novel therapeutic target for Ewing’s Sarcoma” [...]

In collaboration with Drs. Luke Nayak and Arjun Sondhi, Dr. Maria Westerhoff published a report in Gastroenterology titled, "A Rare Complication of a Rare Disease" documents a case of erythropoietic protoporphyria, a rare condition that can affect the liver [...]

A new study finds that U-M-designed compounds led to significantly smaller, slower-growing tumors.

Congratulations to Jolanta Gembecka, PhD, who is one of fourteen in the inaugural class of Rogel Scholars!  As part of the commitment from Richard and Susan Rogel, researchers will have the opportunity and freedom to pursue new directions in their work. Dr. Grembecka's research focus is developing [...]

If a picture's worth a thousand words, a video is perhaps worth much more.

Mark Schultz, PhD strives to create therapeutics for Niemann-Pick disease.

Unique structure of circRNA makes it an ideal candidate for biomarkers – and it can be detected in blood or urine.

The laboratories of Dr. Yali Dou and Dr. Gregory Dressler have collaborated with colleagues at the National Institutes of Health, the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and Indiana University to publish HOXA9 Reprograms the [...]

Researchers identify a lncRNA that provides insight into a key driver of prostate cancer — and a potential target for future therapy.