Welcome to the Laura Heiser Lab
The research laboratory of Laura Heiser, Ph.D., is focused on identifying predictors of drug response and resistance, using novel imaging techniques to identify phenotypic changes associated with molecular aberrations and therapeutic response, and studying the influence of the microenvironment on cancer cells. In all of this research, the lab uses well-integrated experimental and computational approaches to understand the complexity of cancer. Because this work is necessarily multidisciplinary in nature, the lab frequently collaborate with diverse teams of scientists, as illustrated by involvement in the NIH LINCS Consortium, NCI Cancer Systems Biology Consortium (CSBC), and DREAM Project.
Heiser Lab news
6/2023: Heiser Lab paper published in Nature Communications
5/2023: Heiser Lab paper published in Communications Biology
10/2022: Heiser Lab paper published in Communications Biology
5/2022: Dr. Laura Heiser and collaborators receive OHSU Center for Women’s Health Circle of Giving Award
5/2022: Dr. Laura Heiser profiled for OHSU Research Week
4/2022: Nicholas Calistri won first place student poster award at MCBIOS 2022 for "Paclitaxel treatment partially phenocopies interferon response in Triple Negative Breast Cancer, and uniquely upregulated genes implicate potential adaptive resistance mechanisms"
1/2022: New grants awarded:
- R03 in collaboration with Noemi Andor, Ph.D., Moffitt Cancer Center, titled, “A framework to integrate live-cell imaging with single-cell sequencing and learn how cells adapt to new environments”
- Discovery Grant for Cancer Research funded by the Kuni Foundation in collaboration with Zahi Mitri, MD (OHSU), titled, “A preclinical approach to targeting cell state in aggressive metastatic breast cancer”
Recent publications
Gross SM, Mohammadi F, Sanchez-Aguila C, Zhan PJ, Liby TA, Dane MA, Meyer AS, Heiser LM. Analysis and modeling of cancer drug responses using cell cycle phase-specific rate effects. Nat Commun. 2023 Jun 10;14(1):3450. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-39122-z. PMID: 37301933; PMCID: PMC10257663.
Copperman J, Gross SM, Chang YH, Heiser LM^, Zuckerman DM. Morphodynamical cell state description via live-cell imaging trajectory embedding. Communications Biology. 2023;6(1):484. DOI: 10.1038/s42003-023-04837-8 PMID: 37142678 PMCID: PMC10160022.
Gross SM, Dane MA, Smith RL, Devlin K, Mclean I, Derrick D, Mills C, Subramanian K, London A, Torre D, Erdem C, Lyons N, Natoli T, Pessa S, Lu X, Mullahoo J, Li J, Adam M, Wassie B, Liu M, Kilburn DF, Liby T, Bucher E, Sanchez-Aguila C, Daily K, Omberg L, Wang Y, Jacobson C, Yapp C, Chung M, Vidovic D, Lu Y, Schurer S, Lee A, Pillai A, Subramanian A, Papanastasiou M, Fraenkel E, Feiler H, Mills GB, Jaffe J, Ma'ayan A, Birtwistle MR, Sorger PK, Korkola JE, Gray JW, Heiser LM^. A multi-omic analysis of MCF10A cells provides a resource for integrative assessment of ligand-mediated molecular and phenotypic responses. Communications Biology. 2022 Oct 7;5(1):1066. DOI: 10.1038/s42003-022-03975-9 PMID: 36207580 PMCID: PMC9546880
Gross SM, Mohammadi F, Sanchez-Aguila C, Zhan PJ, Meyer AS, Heiser LM. Analysis and modeling of cancer drug responses using cell cycle phase-specific rate effects. bioRxiv. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.24.219907
Gross SM, Dane MA, … Heiser LM. A LINCS microenvironment perturbation resource for integrative assessment of ligand-mediated molecular and phenotypic responses. bioRxiv. 2021:2021.08.06.455429. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.06.455429
Mohammadi F, Visagan S, Gross SM, Karginov L, Lagarde J, Heiser LM, Meyer AS. A lineage tree-based hidden Markov model to quantify cellular heterogeneity and plasticity. bioRxiv. 2021:2021.06.25.449922. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.06.25.449922