Baca Lab News
2026
June 5, 2026 — Congratulations to Paulo on successfully completing his dissertation qualifying examination!
June 3, 2026 — The Baca Lab welcomes Siyan!
June 1, 2026 — Rashad presents at the 2026 ASCO Annual Meeting on using epigenomic liquid biopsy to infer NECTIN4 expression and predict response to enfortumab vedotin in bladder cancer.
June 1, 2026 — Weiwei presents at the 2026 ASCO Annual Meeting on prostate cancer subtyping using cell-free DNA fragmentation signatures.
May 23, 2026 — Gun presents on applications of liquid biopsy in prostate cancer at the International Society of Liquid Biopsy meeting.
May 1, 2026 — David Lee’s News & Views article, “Uncovering risk factors in the exposome for early-onset colorectal cancer,” is published in Nature Medicine.
April 30, 2026 — Surya, Gun, and Paulo present their work at the AI in Health Frontiers meeting in Boston.
April 10, 2026 — Our perspective, “Precision Oncology 2.0: Guiding Magic Bullets With Expression-Based Liquid Biopsy,” is published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
April 8, 2026 — Our preprint, “Transcription Factor Subtype Governs Response and Resistance to DLL3-Directed T-Cell Engagement in Small Cell Lung Cancer,” combines liquid biopsy profiling and mouse modeling to characterize response and resistance to tarlatamab.
April 6, 2026 — Karl and Marc’s preprint, “Cell-Free Chromatin Epigenomic Profiling Enables Non-Invasive Transcriptional Subtyping of Pancreatic Cancer,” is released.
March 20, 2026 — Congratulations to Razane on matching in pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh!
March 16, 2026 — Gun presents to the NCI Liquid Biopsy Interest Group on inferring cancer gene expression from circulating chromatin.
March 2, 2026 — Rashad presents at the 2026 ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium on predicting cell-surface target expression in neuroendocrine prostate cancer using cfChIP-seq.
February 27, 2026 — Ze Zhang receives an AACR Scholar-in-Training Award for his work on urine cell-free DNA methylation signatures for detecting urinary tract cancers.
February 23, 2026 — Sylvan presents the lab’s work as part of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Seminars in Oncology series.
February 19, 2026 — Our preprint, “Integrated Inference of Cancer Gene Expression From Cell-Free Plasma Chromatin,” introduces APEX, a framework for inferring cancer gene expression from circulating chromatin.
2025
December 30, 2025 — Our preprint, “SNAP: Streamlined Nextflow Analysis Pipeline for Immunoprecipitation-Based Epigenomic Profiling of Circulating Chromatin,” is released.
November 13, 2025 — Alexis and Gary’s preprint, “A Chromatin Fiber Model Explains Cell-Free DNA Fragmentation Signatures of Active Regulatory Elements,” demonstrates that enhancer RNA expression can be inferred from cell-free DNA fragmentation patterns.
September 25, 2025 — Sylvan joins a panel discussion on cancer biomarkers at the World CDx Summit.
August 5, 2025 — The Baca Lab welcomes David Jin!
July 9, 2025 — Karl and Rashad’s paper on detecting squamous differentiation in prostate cancer through liquid biopsy is published in npj Precision Oncology.
April 28, 2025 — Ze presents his cfChIP-seq data-analysis pipeline at the AACR Annual Meeting 2025.
April 25, 2025 — Surya presents his work on rare germline genetic variants at the American Physiology Summit 2025.
March 7, 2025 — The Baca Lab welcomes Yukun!
February 18, 2025 — Rashad receives an ASCO Merit Award for his ASCO GU 2025 poster on HIF-2α activity and sarcomatoid differentiation in renal cell carcinoma.
January 7, 2025 — The Baca Lab welcomes Surya!
2024
October 25, 2024 — The Baca Lab receives the Prostate Cancer Foundation–American Cancer Society Young Investigator Award.
October 22, 2024 — The Baca Lab welcomes rotating Harvard Medical School PhD students Chris, Harlan, and Doris!
September 6, 2024 — The Baca Lab receives the Wong Family Award in Translational Oncology.
August 17, 2024 — Medha presents her work on nucleosome-positioning signatures in cell-free DNA at Cold Spring Harbor.
June 25, 2024 — Talal and Karl’s manuscript on epigenomic profiling of sarcomatoid renal cell carcinoma is published in Cell Reports.
April 8, 2024 — The Baca Lab welcomes Ze!
April 4, 2024 — The Baca Lab welcomes Gary!
March 15, 2024 — Congratulations to Dr. Renee-Maria Saliby on matching in internal medicine at Yale!
January 12, 2024 — The Baca Lab receives the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Medical Oncology Discovery Award.
2023
December 13, 2023 — Congratulations to Jesslyn on successfully defending her master’s thesis!
October 21, 2023 — Our new epigenomic liquid biopsy assay is presented at ESMO and published in Nature Medicine.
October 13, 2023 — Sylvan discusses the role of liquid biopsy in precision medicine at the POET Congress in Calgary, Alberta.
September 18, 2023 — The Baca Lab welcomes Alexis, Medha, and Chris!
July 20, 2023 — The Baca Lab receives the Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator Award.
July 13, 2023 — Sylvan discusses applications of liquid biopsy in kidney cancer at the 2023 Kidney Cancer Research Summit.
June 25, 2023 — Karl presents his and Talal’s work on the epigenomics of sarcomatoid renal cell carcinoma at AACR.
June 13, 2023 — The Baca Lab receives an award from the Fund for Innovation in Cancer Informatics to study cell-free DNA fragmentomics.
May 25, 2023 — Our abstract on transcriptional regulators of sarcomatoid differentiation is accepted for presentation at the 2023 Kidney Cancer Research Summit.
May 1, 2023 — The Baca Lab welcomes Paulo!
April 2, 2023 — Karl and Talal’s abstract on epigenomic profiling of sarcomatoid renal cell carcinoma is accepted for presentation at AACR: Advances in Kidney Cancer Research.
February 27, 2023 — The Baca Lab welcomes Shahab!
February 9, 2023 — The Baca Lab receives the Young Physician-Scientist Award from the American Society for Clinical Investigation.
January 30, 2023 — The Baca Lab welcomes Karl!
January 21, 2023 — Our work on the comparative epigenomics of kidney cancer subtypes is published.
2022
September 26, 2022 — The Baca Lab welcomes David Osei!
September 7, 2022 — Our work reveals how genetic determinants of chromatin contribute to inherited prostate cancer risk.
August 20, 2022 — The Baca Lab officially moves into its new space at 375 Longwood Avenue.
August 16, 2022 — Our work characterizes distinct androgen receptor binding profiles in prostate cancer among African American men.
August 5, 2022 — Ziwei’s abstract on polygenic risk scores in lung cancer is accepted for presentation at the American Society of Human Genetics Annual Meeting.
July 16, 2022 — The Baca Lab welcomes Ziwei!