Our first annual lab BBQ! Great food and fun was had by all as we celebrated our first year as a lab. Looking forward to many future BBQs filled with Ladder ball, Spikeball, and competitive watermelon seed spitting!

Our work titled 'Compensatory metabolic networks in pancreatic cancers upon pertubation of glutamine metabolism' is published today in Nature Communications.

As pancreatic cancers rely on glutamine metabolism, here we tested a new glutaminase inhibitor for efficacy in pancreatic cancer. Despite dramatic early effects on proliferation in cell culture, pancreatic cancers have adaptive metabolic networks that sustain proliferation in vitro and in vivo. We use a combination of quantitative proteomics, metabolomics, and bioinformatics to understand this adaptive/resistance response and thereby design effective combinatorial treatments to overcome resistance to glutaminase inhibition.

This work began during Joe's post-doctoral fellowship in the labs of Alec Kimmelman and Wade Harper and was completed during the first few months of the Mancias Lab opening. 

Congrats to Douglas Biancur on his first, first author publication! Doug was a research technician in Alec Kimmelman's lab and then jointly in the Mancias and Kimmelman labs. He has since moved on to graduate school at NYU.

And thanks to all of our collaborators including Joao Paulo and Steve Gygi, Gerald Chu, and Beata Malachowska and Wojciech Fendler!

Joe presents a talk entitled: "Ferritinophagy: The Mechanism and Biological Role" at the 7th International BioIron Society meeting. 

From the IBIS website:
"The International Bioiron Society (IBIS) was founded to advance knowledge about the biological and medical roles of iron and the processes in which it participates with particular reference to those processes of medical and industrial importance. IBIS's specific objectives are to provide a forum for discussions, to promote research and its publication and advance public education on iron chemistry and biology as well as on disorders due to iron deprivation or excess."