Rate My Professor Jisha Antony

Dr Jisha Antony serves as Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Her research centers on chromatin organisation in cancer, with a particular emphasis on leukaemia-associated mutations in chromatin organisers such as cohesin. These mutations impact chromatin folding, contribute to translocations like RUNX1-RUNX1T1, and lead to enhancer dysfunction, which manifests as the major effect by causing gene expression dysregulation during cellular responses to differentiation or external signalling cues. Antony investigates therapeutic interventions to combat this enhancer dysfunction, including the use of enhancer blocking drugs and precise targeting of individual enhancers via CRISPR-Cas9 technology. She conducts genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 screens in cohesin mutant leukaemia cells to pinpoint synthetic lethal targets suitable for therapeutic development. Additionally, her work examines the effects of cohesin mutations on signalling pathways by employing induced pluripotent stem cells that differentiate into haematopoietic cells, thereby assessing changes in chromatin organisation and gene expression. This research is supported by grants from the Cancer Society of New Zealand and the Health Research Council.