EVENTS

February 2020: Todd and Rena Johnson, from The Luke Tatsu Johnson foundation visit SBP to meet with the Deshpande Lab and learn about our work on AML. We are really privileged to be supported by this organization. Their very important fundraising and pediatric cancer research support activities can be seen here (https://www.luketatsujohnsonfoundation.org/).

June 2020: The Deshpande lab stepping into the future! Intense and repetitive work is progressively moving from people to robots, fun times at the lab!

December 2019: End of the year fun with the lab. We go bowling and star-gazing. One lesson learned: Taiwanese rock at bowling :-). And the youngest one wins the raffle prize :-).

December 2019: Our collaborative effort with the Eytan Ruppin Lab is now on BioRxiv. The BioRxiv manuscript becomes one of the most downloaded publications in cancer on the site. First authors Sanju, Karina and Kuoyang are super excited (and nervous!).

December 2019: Our review detailing the role of P53 in AML is now online and can be found here.

October 2019: Lab lunch and ice cream with discussions about science, life and the probabilities of getting NIH funding :-).

August 2019: Our lab is awarded the Emerging Scientist Award from the Children's Cancer Research Foundation (CCRF).

June 2019: Karina's paper on the role of BMI1 in CALM-AF10 AML is now online and can be found here.

September 2019: Karina sails through her pre-quals, she is now officially a candidate!

January 2019: Anagha's paper on investigating genetic dependencies using CRISPR is now online and can be found here.

December 2018: Three abstracts are selected for Merit Awards. Anagha, Karina, and Bryan are super excited to present at the meeting. Lots of opportunities to network and have fun! We promise to be back again next year with much more exciting stuff.

September 2017: The Deshpande Lab gets its first graduate student, Karina Barbosa (yes, think Pirates of the Carribean). Karina (who comes from faraway Tijuana) is super stoked about working on AML using CRISPR and epigenomic technologies.

June 2017: The Deshpande and Ren labs are jointly awarded a collaborative translational research grant through the "Padres-Pedal the Cause" Funding Mechanism offered by the San Diego Cancer Centers Council (C3). We are really grateful and will join the cycling team again this year to "Pedal the Cause"!

May 2017: Calvin Sun joins the lab as a post-doctoral researcher. Calvin graduated from the lab of Dr. Lisa Stubbs at the University of Illinois.

March 2017: Epigenetics on the Mesa - The Deshpande lab, together with the labs of Bing Ren (UCSD), Diana Hargreaves (Salk) and Chris Benner (UCSD), inaugurate the San Diego Chromatin Club and Happy hour, an interactive biweekly seminar series and social mixer for chromatin researchers on the Mesa. The first speakers, Bing Ren and Yupeng He (Joe Ecker's lab) kick it off in style and Active Motif generously agrees to sponsor this bi-weekly event. We are super excited!

February 2017: Bo-Rui (Bryan) Chen, a post-doctoral trainee at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan joins the lab.

November 2016: Ani Deshpande is the 2016 recipient of the V Foundation Scholar Award for Cancer Research and research in the Deshpande Lab was highlighted in a special V Foundation video on ESPN. Read more here. Founded by celebrity basketball coach Jim Valvano (Jimmy V) and ESPN, V Foundation is one of the premier supporters of cancer research in the United States.

September 2016: Ani's lecture for this year at the SBP graduate program is about histones, chromatin, and cancer (surprise!) and the paper discussed for journal club is David Allis and Peter Lewis' seminal paper on oncohistones in diffuse pontine gliomas.

August 2016: Our lab is awarded the SBP Cancer Center Pilot Grant starting from the fall of 2016.

June 2016: First-year Creighton University medical student Kelsey Saddoris comes to San Diego for an internship in the Deshpande lab. Kelsey is now seeking fame in science after she made a splash featuring on the cover of Sports Illustrated in a recreation of Larry Bird's 1977 classic.

April 2016: Anagha has been awarded the Lady Tata Memorial Trust Fellowship for Leukemia Research. Congratulations Anagha!

March 2016: We are delighted to know that our first summer student Snigdha will go to college at Yale this fall, here's wishing all the very best to Snigdha for this exciting phase of her life!

November 2015: Ani teaches a Molecules to Systems Course for the newly accredited SBP graduate program titled "Cancer - The Dark Side of Evolution" based on one of his favorite topics: the role of Darwinian fitness and selection in cancer initiation, progression, and resistance to therapies.

October 2015: The chromatin reader module in AF10 enables H3K79 methylation by the DOT1L complex after sensing the absence of H3K27me, a very interesting structural study from our collaborators in Molecular Cell and can be found here. Important insight into cross-talk between distinct chromatin complexes.

August 2015: Anwesha Ghosh, a recent graduate from Dr. Helene McMurray's lab in Rochester starts her post-doctoral training in the lab.

June 2015: The institute is now renamed the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute or SBPDiscovery. The new institute website is http://www.sbpdiscovery.org

June 2015: Snigdha Nandipati is the first National Spelling Bee Champion to join our lab for an internship and also the first to be featured on major national and international news channels and publications like CNN , NBC , CBS , ESPN and others. In her new Avatar, Snigdha will be inducing "spelling errors" in genes and rendering them non-functional using CRISPR/Cas9 in the Deshpande lab.

Apr 2015: The Deshpande lab is awarded the American Society of Hematology (ASH) Scholar Award for the years 2015-2017. We are really honored to recieve this award!

Jan 2015: Luyi Zhao joins the lab as a research assistant. Luyi is well versed with molecular biology and protein studies and comes to the Sanford Burnham from pharma where she also mastered the art of patient-derived xenograft models. A wannabe part-time photographer, Luyi can be found fiddling with her DSLR when she is not busy pipetting.

Jan 2015: Anagha Deshpande joins forces with Ani after her post-doctoral research in Scott Armstrong's lab in New York. Anagha is focussed on continuing epigenetic investigations in mouse models of heme malignancies.

Dec 2014: The R00 phase of the Howard Temin NCI K99/R00 award kicks in for the years 2015- 2017 to investigate the role of AF10 in leukemia.

Dec 2014: The AF10 manuscript appears in print in Cancer Cell and is accompanied by 3 insightful commentaries. Gemma Alderton writing in Nature Reviews Cancer has a funny illustration depicting how the loss of a single histone methyl mark can weaken AML aggressiveness. Image credits: Nature Reviews Cancer

The Deshpande Lab officially begins operations at the Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, in sunny California. A very welcome change from what is going to be a long and hostile winter in the northeast.