Transforming Oncology: ATCC’s Cutting-Edge Patient-Derived Models

Carolina Lucchesi is BioNexus Foundation Principal Scientist leading the Microphysiological Systems program at ATCC. Dr. Lucchesi received her PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Campinas in Brazil and has over 20 years of experience in Tissue Engineering and Organ-on-Chip technology. In her current role, Dr. Lucchesi leads the MPS program bringing new capabilities in the use of advanced 3D models and developing existing and new content to be applied in state-of-art technologies.

Dr. Fang Tian, Director of Biological Content for ATCC, has extensive experience in cell biology and molecular biology. She oversees human, animal cell lines and hybridomas, and product development in the Cell Biology General Collection at ATCC. Dr. Tian was a research fellow in Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. She conducted postdoctoral research at the Hillman Cancer Institute of UPMC.

Jesse Boehm is the Chief Science Officer of Break Through Cancer and maintains a research lab focused on bringing the power of functional genomics to bear on living samples from cancer patients with particular emphasis on rare and underrepresented tumors. Before joining Break Through Cancer, Jesse spent 14 years in the Broad Institute’s Cancer Program, most recently as an Institute Scientist and Scientific Director of the Cancer Dependency Map project. As the Director of the Broad’s Cancer Model Development Center (part of the National Cancer Institute’s Human Cancer Models Initiative), he led his laboratory in developing a scalable capacity to convert patient tumors into organoids and other cell models. Prior, he was the recipient of a Broad Institute Merkin Fellowship and the Associate Director of the Broad’s Cancer Program. In these leadership roles, he drove the scientific planning and strategic execution of a diverse set of program projects, collaborations, and activities for over a decade. Jesse received his BS in biology from MIT and his PhD from Harvard University, Division of Medical Sciences at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Andrew McPherson is an Assistant Attending Computational Oncologist in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and a faculty member of Computational Oncology. Andrew’s research focuses on computational methods for analysis of single cell genomic data, with specific focus on understanding genomic instability, mutational processes, clonal evolution and the role of the microenvironment in cancer development and progression. During his doctoral research, Dr. McPherson developed methods for cancer genome sequence analysis, including detection and characterization of genome rearrangements, and inference of clonal phylogenies. Dr. McPhersons post-doctoral research at University of British Columbia focused on the development of computational methods and infrastructure for a novel single cell whole genome sequencing (scWGS) platform, Direct Library Preparation. During his time at MSKCC, Dr. McPherson has led efforts to establish a production implementation of scWGS via DLP within MSKCC, and support use of the platform through collaborations with investigators throughout the institute. In addition, Dr. McPherson has contributed to several large scale single cell genomics studies of Breast and Ovarian cancer.