Research Laboratories

Our laboratory is interested in understanding how basic cellular mechanisms become coopted in cancer and in harnessing these insights to improve cancer diagnosis and treatment. We focus on elucidating key drivers of cancer phenotypes, particularly those seen in prostate cancer and bladder cancer.

The broad focus of our laboratory is exploring mechanisms of drug resistance and cancer metastasis. These are two major challenges that significantly limit anti-cancer therapy and claim millions of lives worldwide.

Our laboratory is interested in understanding how mucosal immune responses are coordinated to maintain homeostasis and respond to microbial infection, barrier disruption, or alterations in commensal microbial diversity — with an emphasis on how these molecular decisions are balanced within the context of host fitness and organ physiology.

Our research is primarily concerned with olfaction, or the sense of smell. The olfactory system provides an excellent system with which to address basic issues of neuroscience such as the nature of sensory representations and their influence on behavior using all of the tools that modern biology provides.

We use biochemical, cellular, and organismal approaches to characterize the BRCA1/BARD complex and its associated factors, such as the DNA repair protein CtIP [4-6]. In this manner, we seek to define the biological functions of the BRCA1/BARD1 pathway in normal cells, particularly with respect to maintenance of genome stability, and how the loss of these functions promotes breast and ovarian cancer

In our laboratory, we investigate various regulatory mechanisms that promote AID activity during CSR and SHM but prevent it from causing oncogenic chromosomal translocations. In the process of addressing critical question regarding antibody diversification mechanisms, we investigate the fields of DNA recombination, non-coding RNA processing, and DNA damage repair .

Our laboratory uses systems biology principles to elucidate and then investigate cell regulatory networks. We are particularly interested in applying this perspective to understand cancer tumorigenesis, drug resistance, and cellular heterogeneity, and are working with clinical researchers at Columbia University Medical Center to conduct N-of-1 clinical trials for precision cancer medicine.

The Chio lab uses 3D organoid cultures and genetically engineered mouse models to study redox dependencies in pancreatic cancer.

Our research relates to the genetic basis of a variety of human diseases including obesity, type 2 diabetes, congenital heart disease, cardiomyopathies, arrhythmias, Long QT syndrome, pulmonary hypertension, endocrinopathies, congenital diaphragmatic hernias, cleft lip/cleft palate, seizures, intellectual disabilities, autism, inherited metabolic conditions, rare disorders, and breast and pancreatic cancer susceptibility.

The Ciccia Lab investigates how genome instability causes cancer and other genetic disorders.