Poster session presenters share cancer metabolism research at the inaugural TCMI Symposium.
Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University marked a significant milestone on April 3 with the first annual Translational Cancer Metabolism Initiative (TCMI) Symposium, bringing together 65 faculty members and trainees for a day of scientific exchange at Emory’s Health Sciences Research Building.
Showcasing TCMI
The symposium served as a broader introduction to TCMI and its goals. The initiative is open to all investigators with active projects in cancer metabolism or interest in bridging metabolism, cancer and artificial intelligence research. TCMI is co‑led by Winship researchers Biplab Dasgupta, PhD, MBA, Sumin Kang, PhD, and Mala Shanmugam, PhD, MS.
Targeting metabolism to drive new cancer therapies
Ralph DeBerardinis, MD, PhD
TCMI Symposium presenters shared insights from a range of cancer metabolism studies with direct therapeutic potential.
Keynote speaker Ralph DeBerardinis, MD, PhD, director of the Eugene McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development and director of the Genetic and Metabolic Disease Program at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, discussed foundational research and recent translational progress in his address, “Metabolic reprogramming in human cancer.”
Other presentations highlighted the breadth of cancer metabolism research underway at Winship:
- Timothy Gershon, MD, PhD, “Interconnected serine, glycine and methionine metabolism present therapeutic opportunities for medulloblastoma”
- Sumin Kang, PhD, “Metabolic targeting to overcome metastasis and resistance”
- Chaoran Li, PhD, “Subset- and stage-specific roles of regulatory T cells in metabolic liver disease”
- Mala Shanmugam, PhD, MS, “Metabolite‑driven resistance in multiple myeloma”
- Jianhua Xiong, PhD, “Fatty acid metabolism as a regulator of cell fate in cancer”
Spotlighting early-career investigators
Complementing the faculty presentations, two top‑scoring abstracts from Winship trainees earned 15‑minute short‑talk slots:
- Shiyu He (Kemp lab), “Multi-scale metabolic modeling of CAR-T cell products: from patient-level biomarkers to subtype-specific flux patterns”
- Siddhartha Gangopadhyay, PhD (Dasgupta lab), “Adaptive mono-unsaturated fatty acid supply networks stratify glioblastoma into therapeutically distinct metabolic subtypes”
In addition to the short talks, the symposium featured a poster competition showcasing trainee research. Awards were given to the three top‑scoring poster presenters:
- 1st place: A facile yeast-display approach for antibody mask discovery
Nithya Badarinath
PhD Student, Bioengineering
Georgia Tech
Principal Investigator: John Blazeck, PhD - 2nd place: From hyperglycemia to cancer: diabetes-driven metabolic reprogramming primes tissues for oncogenesis
Syeda Warisul Fatima, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow, Pediatric Neuro-Oncology
Emory University School of Medicine
Principal Investigator: Biplab Dasgupta, PhD, MBA - 3rd place: The lipid-angiogenesis axis in glioblastoma
Roman Caceres, MS
PhD Student, Cancer and Cell Biology
University of Cincinnati/Emory University
Principal Investigator: Biplab Dasgupta, PhD, MBA
