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Michael A. Dyer, PhD

Chair
Department of Developmental Neurobiology
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

Affiliated Professor
Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
DTRC Room D2038D
262 Danny Thomas Place, MS 324
Memphis, TN 38105-3678
Tel: 901.595.2257
Fax: 901.595.7641
Email: Michael A. Dyer

Education

  • PhD Institution: Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Links

St. Jude Faculty - Michael A. Dyer

Research Interests

My laboratory studies the regulation of growth during neural development and disease. Cell division must be carefully regulated during brain development to ensure that the resulting tissue is the appropriate size and contains the correct proportion of each specialized cell type. If the precise balance of cell types were altered in the brain, then the different neurons and glia would not be able to work together to process information. Many of the genes that control growth during development are also involved in regulating cell division following brain injury or in certain degenerative processes. In addition, these genes are often mutated in cancer cells. Therefore, by studying the regulation of growth during development, we can learn about the cause and progression of a variety of diseases in the central nervous system. This may ultimately lead to the design of better treatments for neural injury, degeneration and cancer.

The retina is a specialized region of the central nervous system that receives and processes visual information. Like the rest of the central nervous system, injury, degeneration and cancer involve changes in the growth properties of retinal cells. We use a wide range of experimental approaches to study how cell division is controlled during retinal development and disease. Methods currently being used in the lab include genetically engineered mice, replication incompetent retroviral vectors suitable for in vivo studies, explant culture systems, microarray hybridization, and to extended our observations to human retinopathies we use normal and diseased human tissue and monkey samples. Experimental approaches that are under development include retinal physiology (ERG), electron microscopy, cell sorting, in vivo mouse models of retinoblastoma, and computational modeling of proliferation during development.

Representative Publications

  • Qadeer ZA, Valle-Garcia D, Hasson D, Sun Z, Cook A, Nguyen C, Soriano A, Ma A, Griffiths LM, Zeineldin M, Filipescu D, Jubierre L, Chowdhury A, Deevy O, Chen X, Finkelstein DB, Bahrami A, Stewart E, Federico S, Gallego S, Dekio F, Fowkes M, Meni D, Maris JM, Weiss WA, Roberts SS, Cheung NV, Jin J, Segura MF, Dyer MA, Bernstein E. ATRX In-Frame Fusion Neuroblastoma Is Sensitive to EZH2 Inhibition via Modulation of Neuronal Gene Signatures. Cancer Cell. 2019 Nov 11;36(5):512-527.e9. doi: 10.1016/j.ccell.2019.09.002. Epub 2019 Oct 17. PubMed PMID: 31631027; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6851493.
  • Norrie JL, Lupo MS, Xu B, Al Diri I, Valentine M, Putnam D, Griffiths L, Zhang J, Johnson D, Easton J, Shao Y, Honnell V, Frase S, Miller S, Stewart V, Zhou X, Chen X, Dyer MA. Nucleome Dynamics during Retinal Development. Neuron. 2019 Nov 6;104(3):512-528.e11. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2019.08.002. Epub 2019 Sep 4. PubMed PMID: 31493975; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6842117.
  • Oberlick EM, Rees MG, Seashore-Ludlow B, Vazquez F, Nelson GM, Dharia NV, Weir BA, Tsherniak A, Ghandi M, Krill-Burger JM, Meyers RM, Wang X, Montgomery P, Root DE, Bieber JM, Radko S, Cheah JH, Hon CS, Shamji AF, Clemons PA, Park PJ, Dyer MA, Golub TR, Stegmaier K, Hahn WC, Stewart EA, Schreiber SL, Roberts CWM. Small-Molecule and CRISPR Screening Converge to Reveal Receptor Tyrosine Kinase Dependencies in Pediatric Rhabdoid Tumors. Cell Rep. 2019 Aug 27;28(9):2331-2344.e8. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.07.021. PubMed PMID: 31461650.
  • Nguyen R, Moustaki A, Norrie JL, Brown S, Akers WJ, Shirinifard A, Dyer MA. Interleukin-15 Enhances Anti-GD2 Antibody-Mediated Cytotoxicity in an Orthotopic PDX Model of Neuroblastoma. Clin Cancer Res. 2019 Dec 15;25(24):7554-7564. doi: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-19-1045. Epub 2019 Aug 27. PubMed PMID: 31455682.
  • Patel SA, Qureshi MM, Dyer MA, Jalisi S, Grillone G, Truong MT. Comparing surgical and nonsurgical larynx-preserving treatments with total laryngectomy for locally advanced laryngeal cancer. Cancer. 2019 Oct 1;125(19):3367-3377. doi: 10.1002/cncr.32292. Epub 2019 Jun 17. PubMed PMID: 31206637.
  • Kerekes RA, Martins RAP, Davis D, Karakaya M, Gleason S, Dyer MA. Correction to: Imaging features of immune-mediated genitourinary disease. Neurochem Res. 2019 Jul;44(7):1780. doi: 10.1007/s11064-019-02811-7. PubMed PMID: 31104195.

View more references (pubmed link)

May 26, 2022