Binyamin Knisbacher, PhD
Project Title
Beyond the Mutation: Uncovering Oncogenic Intronic Polyadenylation and its Clinical Impact in Blood Cancers
About the Investigator
Dr. Binyamin Knisbacher is a computational biologist and cancer researcher at Bar-Ilan University. He received his training in computational genomics at Bar-Ilan University and completed postdoctoral training at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he focused on cancer genomics. His research combines bioinformatics, genomics, machine learning and clinical data analysis to better understand blood cancers and improve patient care. Dr. Knisbacher works closely with hematologists in Israel and abroad and has contributed to large international studies of leukemia, including a landmark analysis of over 1,100 patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia published in Nature Genetics.
About the Research
Most cancers are caused by mutations in DNA, but in many patients—especially in blood cancers—DNA mutations are scarce or even absent. What drives the cancer’s growth in such cases? Recent research has shown that the function of crucial cancer-preventing genes can be disrupted even without mutations. In these cases, interfering with how these genes are expressed is enough. In other words, the genetic blueprint itself remains intact, but the process of reading it is cut short, producing a broken RNA molecule that can no longer protect the cell from becoming cancerous.
Dr. Knisbacher and his students are developing a computer program that uses machine-learning to identify these hidden events. They will apply it to thousands of blood cancer samples to determine how common this process is and whether it can be used – similar to DNA mutations – to assess disease severity and predict patient survival and response to specific treatments, with the ultimate goal of helping physicians select the most effective therapy for each blood cancer patients.
