Venue: Seminar Hall
Speaker: Professor Aseem Z. Ansari
Title: Deciphering the universal code that controls decoding of the genome by RNA polymerase II
About Speaker: Professor Aseem Z. Ansari, is Co-Founder Director of Khorana and Bose Programs & Prof. of Chemical genomics and Synthetic Biology, Department of Biochemistry and Genome center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. He received his B.Sc. from St. Xavier’s in Bombay and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in Chicago (1994). Prof. Aseem was a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow and a Resident Advisor at Harvard University (1994-1997) and a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1998) and the Cornell Medical School/Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (1998-2002). Since 2002, in the Genome Center of Wisconsin, the Ansari group has pioneered the creation of synthetic gene switches to control human stem cell fate. Recently, by integrating chemistry, genomics, molecular medicine and bioinformatics, the Ansari group has created a designer gene switch that can find and fix a gene that causes an incurable neuronal disease (Friedreich’s ataxia). The design strategy permits the precision-targeting of other genes whose malfunction causes a wide array of diseases. This work provides a new path to precision and personalized medicine.
Inspired by works of Prof. HarGobind Khorana, in 2008 Dr. Ansari established the Khorana Scholars Program to provide talented Indian students an exposure to the research culture of the U.S.. To extend the opportunity to scholars in non-biological sciences, he then founded the S.N. Bose Scholars Program in 2013. These prestigious Indo-U.S. scholar exchange programs identify and place India’s top 100 STEM students in the leading U.S. institutions. The funding for both Khorana and Bose programs is provided by the Government of India. This Ministry of Science and Technology funding also includes fellowships for U.S. STEM students who are interested in research internships in India. Since their inception, the programs have placed over a 1000 students in the leading U.S. universities including, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Princeton.
Abstract of the talk: Drugs that target the general transcriptional machinery are an exciting, promising line of therapeutics. The association between the cancer cell and subverted translation in promoting pathology is also becoming increasingly apparent. I will present "translation attenuation" as another potential mode of action by which transcriptional inhibitors can selectively kill tumor cells and leave healthy cells relatively unharmed. This will be a new mode of targeting particularly aggressive cancers.
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