Dr Vijay Tiwari, a Group Leader at the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) in Mainz, has been awarded the Bruno Speck Award by the Swiss Foundation of Haematological Research. The award recognises outstanding work by young scientists in the fields of haematology and stem cell research.
Dr Tiwari received the award in recognition of his research into stem cell differentiation and the role of direct histone modification by the signalling molecule JNK in this process. This discovery, published in Nature Genetics, provided the first evidence that chromatin can be directly affected by kinase signalling molecules. This represents a novel mechanism by which genes can be regulated. As JNK is involved with a signalling pathway that is impaired in many types of cancer, this research may pave the way for the development of new cancer therapies.
The research was conducted while Dr Tiwari was studying chromatin modification in the laboratory of Dirk Schübeler at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) in Basel, Switzerland. It was carried out in collaboration with FMI's Michael Stadler and Renato Paro from the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering from ETH Zürich. Dr Tiwari is now continuing this research at IMB. Here his group is investigating the mechanisms by which epigenetic machinery and regulatory factors contribute to the transcriptional reprogramming that defines cell-type, and is identifying how this communication is altered in diseases such as cancer.
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