Epigenetics & Chromatin

Biography

Dr. Bennani-Baiti, a former Howard Hughes Scholar and Human Genetics Fellow at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, carried out research into the molecular mechanisms of gene regulation at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He later joined the faculty of St. Louis University School of Medicine wherein he continued this work. He currently leads several research programs at the Children′s Cancer Research Institute into the systems biology of childhood cancers, with a particular interest in sarcomas and other mesenchyme-derived tumors. He is also interested in the deregulation of signaling pathways (e.g. p53, Notch) and miRNAs in cancer, in epigenetics and epigenomics, and in novel methods to inferring tumor biomarkers and drug targets from Omics datasets. Dr. Bennani-Baiti is an active member of the American Association for Cancer Research, AACR Pediatric Cancer Working Group, Epigenetics Society, International Society for Systems Biology, and Society for Mathematical Biology.

Research Interest

Dr. Bennani-Baiti is interested in the mechanisms of tumor pathogenesis, as well as in tumor, metastasis, and prognosis markers, with a current focus in childhood cancers. He has recently developed bioinformatic and mathematical methods to uncovering genes significantly associated with particular disease states from small-size cohorts (which cannot be analyzed with conventional statistical methods for lack of statistical power), the only cohorts available for most childhood and adult cancers. Using such methods, he has for example discovered the first metastasis and prognosis molecular markers of Ewing′s sarcoma, a highly aggressive tumor of bone and soft tissues that afflicts mostly children and young adults. He is also interested in inferring signaling pathway status and connectivity directly from tumor specimen. He is also conducting investigations into the epigenetic mechanisms of tumorigenesis.