Deepak Nagrath, an Indian American Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan, has received the Departmental Faculty Award.
Biomedical Engineering (BME) nominated Nagrath in light of recent recognitions for his research program investigating cancer cell metabolism and his national leadership in transcriptional medicine, according to a university press release.
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He is part of the leadership team for the Center for Transcriptional Medicine (CTM), which brings together more than 40 researchers from seven universities with the common goal of alleviating the burden of end-stage organ diseases through mRNA-LNP therapies.
This interdisciplinary team of experts fosters collaboration and accelerates the development of exciting findings into clinical populations. The main goal of the Center for Transcriptional Medicine is to catalyze the generation of a novel approach to reprogram chronically injured tissues and organs.
A recent issue of the U-M Rogel Cancer Center’s “Illuminate” magazine highlighted Nagrath’s work, featuring ways his lab studies how the tumor microenvironment communicates with and fuels cancer cells.
Nagrath’s lab is focused on answering the question-What is the role of tumor microenvironment in modulating cancer cell metabolism? Nagrath lab has developed several metabolic isotope tracing and 13C-based metabolic flux analysis techniques.
Recently, the lab developed a metabolic systems biology approach, collateral lethal genes identification via metabolic fluxes (CLIM) to integrate genomic and transcriptomic data with machine learning and genome-scale metabolic flux analysis in ovarian cancer.
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Notably, the lab is focused on personalized metabolic therapy and circulating tumor cell organoids and tumor tissue slices in pancreatic, lung, and breast cancers. With extensive expertise in machine learning, metabolic flux analysis and systems metabolomics, the lab is building new quantitative models to measure flux in brain cancers and their microenvironment.
Nagrath earned his bachelor of technology in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, and his MS in applied mathematics and PhD in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.