Biography
Ari M. Melnick, MD, is Gebroe Family Professor of Hematology/Oncology in the Departments of Medicine and Pharmacology at the Weill Cornell Medical College in NewYork City. He is chair of the Hematologic Malignancies Program of the Weill Cornell Cancer Center, Director of the Sackler Center for Biomedical and Physical Sciences at Weill Cornell. He has chaired a number of international meetings in hematology, cancer and epigenetics. He has authored or co-authored more than 250 manuscripts in journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, Cancer Cell, Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology and the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Melnick’s research is focused on discovering transcriptional and epigenomic mechanisms that drive lymphoid and myeloid neoplasms and harnessing these mechanisms for development of novel drugs and therapeutic regimens for cancer patients. This has led him to early on apply methodologies such as HiC, etc to explore how sets of genes become coordinated during the immune response and disrupted in cancer. Dr. Melnick uses two general approaches to study these mechanisms. On the one hand his group performs focused biochemical and biological mechanistic research on specific transcriptional and epigenetic modifiers that play key roles in normal and malignant tissues. He has used this work to design novel kinds of therapeutic agents including the first rationally designed transcription factor inhibitor as well as to translate to the clinic specific targeted therapies in a more precise manner. In the second approach Dr. Melnick uses the tools of systems biology and high throughout genomics to explore how the epigenome is perturbed in human patients with disease. Along these lines he performed the first organized and comprehensive epigenome mapping in human disease. These studies have expanded to include an international network and over 3000 patients enrolled in various large-scale clinical trials.