Jesse Boehm

As we mark five years of Break Through Cancer, we’re posting here for the first time!
Five years ago, we asked:
What would cancer research look like if collaboration was built into the design?
#RadicalCollaboration™ is our answer.
These numbers reflect the scale

Both chambers of Congress have now passed the FY26 minibus with NIH provisions. The President will sign.

(1) $48.7 billion for NIH
(2) Full IDC recovery
(3) No more multi-year funding
(4) No NIH reorganization, maintaining the current IC structure.

We are excited to join The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research, Lustgarten Foundation, Break Through Cancer, and Tina's Wish in a collaboration to solve the critical problem of early detection and diagnosis for some of the world’s deadliest cancers. buff.ly/EAA0knn

Long time off this platform.. excited to be back to share that I have been elected President of the @thesfpm.bsky.social alongside @boehmjesse.bsky.social. This community has been a true home for those of us for whom patient-derived models and functional testing belong at the center of cancer care/n

Great to hear Iain Foulkes join @break-cancer.bsky.social's @boehmjesse.bsky.social, @su2c.bsky.social's Julian Adams & NUT Carcinoma Alliance's Maddie Musselman at @milkeninstitute.org #MIHealthSummit to discuss how global collaboration can drive innovation in cancer research #CancerGrandChallenges

It was a great discussion! There has never before been so much opportunity to work together to solve the major challenges of our field.

We are very proud of our Accelerating GBM Therapies TeamLab for this outstanding, potentially field changing work. We must sample continuously to understand hidden, temporal responses to therapy. Even in the brain.

Excited to get this out there as we go through revisions. These findings have changed how I think about KIAA1549-BRAF of pediatric gliomas, and all other fusions, completely.

The fusion partner is important, necessary and engenders novel vulnerabilities that can be therapeutically targeted.

multicolored whorls of cell data, resembling ocean currents or fingerprints

Be sure to catch Jesse Boehm @boehmjesse.bsky.social in the Tumoroids, Organoids, and Cell Culture session at #AACR25! He’ll present how patient-derived cancer models are shaping research on rare and understudied cancers.
🔗 www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/20273...

Today marks the beginning of OpenRxiv, which replaces bioRxiv and medRxiv, the world's largest preprint platform for life and medical science
openrxiv.org/introducing-...
@openrxiv.bsky.social

Anna Greka: Molecular Sleuthing for Rare Diseases Listen now | Finding the Mechanisms and the Basis for Potential Cures

Research support for rare diseases, which cumulatively affect ~30 million Americans, is primarily derived from NIH.
Such work is exemplified by Prof Anna Greka @broadinstitute.org in a new Ground Truths podcast.
Open-access, w/ transcript, video, no ads
erictopol.substack.com/p/anna-greka...

3 points of progress vs pancreatic cancer!
1. Neoantigen vaccines
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
2. KRAS drugs
www.wsj.com/health/healt...
3. Early diagnosis www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Francis Collins, the NIH Director for 12 years, led the Human Genome Project and other NIH efforts for 32 years, resigned today. Key words from his resignation letter
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/u...

Suzanne George, MD

“The rare tumor space is an example of where we should think hard about the quality data that we have and how we can help inform future treatments,” @danafarber.bsky.social’s Suzanne George, MD, shared at #RareDiseaseSummit 2025.

Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere US President Donald Trump is taking a wrecking ball to science and to international institutions. The global research community must take a stand against these attacks.

Inexplicably, US administration has launched an unprecedented assault on science, on research institutions & on vital international organizations & initiatives.

An assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere; the global community must unite
🧪
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Excited to be speaking this Tuesday, Feb. 25 at #RareDiseaseSummit 2025, @GlobeEvent’s inaugural summit focused on innovation and advocacy in rare disease, “From Bench to Bedside: Rare Cancer Innovations.” Sign up to join in person or virtually: @bostonglobe.com rarediseasesummit2025.splashthat.com

SKI complex loss renders 9p21.3-deleted or MSI-H cancers dependent on PELO - Nature Analysis of large-scale CRISPR screening data, combined with experiments in patient-derived tumour organoid models, identifies PELO as a potential therapeutic target in chromosomal 9p21.3-deleted canc...

Exciting new synthetic lethal target emerging from #depmap data 🧪🧬

Frequent passenger mutations in genes involved in mRNA quality control lead to a dependency on PELO-HBS1L

Congratulations to the DepMap team! @vazquezf.bsky.social
#depmap #cancertarget #syntheticlethal

SKI complex loss renders 9p21.3-deleted or MSI-H cancers dependent on PELO - Nature Analysis of large-scale CRISPR screening data, combined with experiments in patient-derived tumour organoid models, identifies PELO as a potential therapeutic target in chromosomal 9p21.3-deleted canc...

(1/3) Excited to share our latest work using
@depmap.org to uncover a new synthetic lethality in two distinct patient populations!

We found that SKI complex inactivation through two independent genomic alterations creates a dependency on PELO

#CancerResearch #SyntheticLethality #Genomics #DepMap

A full attack on US science means the red & blue lines will soon cross. Scientists just want science to progress to help society. This administration - and "Pres Musk" - is telling us they don't need/want US science. We will see many of our great ideas and innovation will go to China and elsewhere

NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately The move halts a large slice of money for most universities and research institutions virtually overnight, imperiling vital research in everything from cancer to heart disease.

Breaking news: The Trump administration cut billions in biomedical funding. Researchers say it imperils work on cancer and other illnesses.

NIH slashes overhead payments for research, sparking outrage Move to cut indirect cost rate to 15% could cost universities billions of dollars

The National Institutes of Health plans to severely cut the percentage of its grant money that can be used for overhead costs rather than research.

This will kill science in the US. This is how China wins. Why is this not on the news? Why are people not more upset about this?

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

This!

Thank you #AACR for your strong support of #cancer researchers and the people who do that work!

www.aacr.org/about-the-aa...

Think zebras: challenges and opportunities for treating rare cancers The adage goes, ‘When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras’. However, placing less emphasis on ‘zebras’ – both in the clinical and research space – can prevent many rare cancers from being ...

It's time to tackle rare cancers together - both a scientific opportunity and a moral imperative! I've shared a few brief thoughts in the Trends in Cancer opinions perspective on this topic - out now online www.cell.com/trends/cance...

PERISCOPE logo PERISCOPE Acronym: Perturbation Effect Readout In situ via Single-cell optical phenotyping (yeah it's a mouthful)

So, we teamed up with Anne and Paul’s lab, along with Calvin Jan at Calico, with the aim of building an accessible & unbiased high-content cell profiling platform that could be applied to genome-scale CRISPR screens (Project PERISCOPE).

Massively parallel phenotyping of coding variants in cancer with Perturb-seq - Nature Biotechnology The functional impact of somatic mutations in cancer genes is determined by pooled Perturb-seq.

We’re big fans of using expression-based profiling (specifically Perturb-seq) to generate high-dimensional phenotypic profiles of perturbed cells, and w/ @oana-ursu.bsky.social & @boehmjesse.bsky.social have used it successfully for generating variant effect maps (www.nature.com/articles/s41...)

A genome-wide atlas of human cell morphology - Nature Methods An optical pooled cell profiling platform (PERISCOPE) based on Cell Painting and optical sequencing of molecular barcodes was used to develop the first unbiased genome-wide morphology-based perturbati...

Our paper “A genome-wide atlas of human cell morphology” is finally out today in @naturemethods.bsky.social ! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

(I tweeted about our preprint in 2023 over at the bad place, but deactivated my account, so here we go again!)