Orian Shirihai, MD, PhD

Dr. Shirihai is heading a mitochondria and metabolism research lab and has a variety of collaborations with cancer researchers that are looking into the role of mitochondria in cancer. His lab's recent discoveries of molecules that target mitochondria functions are of particular interest to the cancer metabolism field. His lab's recent publications describing new methods to measure mitochondria function in frozen biopsies has been widely utilized for tumor metabolic phenotyping. Dr. Shirihai's lab has been running a variety of training sessions in mitochondria research approaches. He believes that membership in the JCCC may help communicating the opportunities to the cancer research communities.

Momcilovic M, Jones A, Bailey ST, Waldmann CM, Li R, Lee JT, Abdelhady G, Gomez A, Holloway T, Schmid E, Stout D, Fishbein MC, Stiles L, Dabir DV, Dubinett SM, Christofk H, Shirihai O, Koehler CM, Sadeghi S, Shackelford DB. In vivo imaging of mitochondrial membrane potential in non-small-cell lung cancer. Nature. 2019 Nov;575(7782):380-384. doi: 10.1038/s41586-019-1715-0. Epub 2019 Oct 30. Erratum in: Nature. 2020 Jan;577(7791):E7. PMID: 31666695; PMCID: PMC7328016.

Shen N, Korm S, Karantanos T, Li D, Zhang X, Ritou E, Xu H, Lam A, English J, Zong WX, Liu CT, Shirihai O, Feng H. DLST-dependence dictates metabolic heterogeneity in TCA-cycle usage among triple-negative breast cancer. Commun Biol. 2021 Nov 16;4(1):1289. doi: 10.1038/s42003-021-02805-8. PMID: 34785772; PMCID: PMC8595664.

Acin-Perez R, Benador IY, Petcherski A, Veliova M, Benavides GA, Lagarrigue S, Caudal A, Vergnes L, Murphy AN, Karamanlidis G, Tian R, Reue K, Wanagat J, Sacks H, Amati F, Darley-Usmar VM, Liesa M, Divakaruni AS, Stiles L, Shirihai OS. A novel approach to measure mitochondrial respiration in frozen biological samples. EMBO J. 2020 Jul 1;39(13):e104073. doi: 10.15252/embj.2019104073. Epub 2020 May 20. PMID: 32432379; PMCID: PMC7327496.