Projects

Together with the scientists at Agenus, a US-based biotech company specializing in innovative forms of cancer treatment, including the discovery and development of immuno-oncology therapies, ABI has formed a team of students and researchers to study cancer metastases and identify potential biomarkers and targets for cancer immunotherapies. This collaboration is also part of our long-term vision of supporting biotech developments in Armenia. The team discovers transcriptomics heterogeneity of Liver ...

The overarching objective of this project is to utilize nanopore sequencing technology and to develop machine learning–based pipelines for the integrative analysis of heterogeneous biological "big data," including multi-omic and phenotypic datasets. The goal is to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying selected cancers and to identify novel omics-based markers for cancer classification, diagnostics, and prognostics.

Space radiation (IR) from Solar Particle Events (SPE) and Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR), also known as high charge and energy (HZE) IR, is a primary risk associated with deep-space missions. There are limited animal and human studies on the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) development due to space-IR. The cardiac effects induced by space-type IR, specifically simplified GCR simulated (simGCRsim)-IR, are yet to be discovered. We hypothesized that gamma (γ) and simGCRsim IR-induced biological ...

In this project genetic engineering and functional genomics approaches will be used to describe molecular mechanisms of FMF. Using DNA/RNA samples obtained from FMF patients and healthy subjects MEFV nanopore gene sequencing will be performed to identify genetic variants and possibly find novel putative functional variants. The impact of genetic variants on transcriptome landscape will be studies by RNA-sequencing using nanopore sequencing device. Based on MEFV sequencing data and patients clinical ...

The aim of this project is to establish a bank of induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF) using cell reprogramming approaches for a more comprehensive study of disease molecular mechanisms. In Armenia, FMF prevalence is about 14-100 per 10,000 inhabitants, depending on the region. For the comprehensive research of the disease, it is necessary to have appropriate cell platforms that will contain pathogenic mutations of the FMF. Created stem cell bank ...