BU Researcher Receives Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Award

Ruben Dries, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, has received a two-year, $350,000 grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to fund his research project, “Enhancing Giotto for spatial multi-resolution technologies.”

Together with researchers from the Guo-Cheng Yuan Laboratory at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, the funds will be used to support further development to their popular software project, called Giotto. Giotto is an open-source platform for spatial omics analysis. Specifically, they plan to extend its functionalities towards datasets generated by the latest spatial technologies.

Dries and his team work at the interface of cancer biology, epigenetics and transcription. Their goal is to understand the transcriptional principles of cellular plasticity (the ability of cells to change their phenotypes without genetic mutations in response to environmental cues) and its sources of variation in multicellular tissues in both health and disease.

“By generating experimental data and applying computational and statistical methods, we aim to better understand and intervene in processes such as tumor formation and treatment resistance. We are particularly interested in improving diagnosis and treatment options for breast cancer and working together with our clinical collaborators at Boston Medical Center to eliminate racial disparities in cancer care and research,” said Dries.

Dries received his master’s degree in biomedical sciences at KU Leuven and Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He received his PhD in stem cell biology at KU Leuven as well as a PhD in systems biology at Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, Netherlands. He then pursued his postdoctoral fellow in computational biology and cancer research at Harvard University and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was founded in 2015 to help solve some of society’s toughest challenges — from eradicating disease and improving education, to addressing the needs of local communities.