Gene Control Approach to Manipulate Cell State: Sensitizing Cancer Cells to Antibody-mediated Attack
David Orlando, PhD Syros Pharmaceuticals
David Orlando, PhD Principal Scientist
Syros Pharmaceuticals
Dr. David Orlando is a Principal Scientist leading computational biology research at Syros Pharmaceuticals. He received his Ph.D. in Computational Biology from the Duke University and conducted his postdoctoral training in the lab of Dr. Richard Young at the Whitehead Institute. He is author on more than 25 scientific publications and issued patents. His research focuses on using high-throughput genomic approaches to understand the transcriptional and epigenetic processes that define and control cell state. While at the Whitehead Institute he was the lead computational biologist on the team that discovered the existence of super-enhancers, which regulate genes that play the most prominent roles in cell identity. He brought that deep knowledge of transcriptional biology and computational biology to Syros as one of the initial scientists at the founding of the company. While at Syros he built the computational biology team which is responsible for the genomic analysis underlying Syros’s gene control platform which is designed to systematically and efficiently analyze the non-coding regulatory regions of the genome from human disease tissue to identify and drug novel targets linked to genomically defined patient populations. Those efforts have allowed the company to quickly translate discoveries made by their platform into clinical programs and Syros currently has two programs in clinical trials.