Eytan Ruppin

I am an MD and PhD (Computer Science) and have served as a professor of Computer Science & Medicine at Tel-Aviv University in the last 20 years, conducting multi-disciplinary research spanning a wide variety of topics. I have joined the University of Maryland in July 2014 as a CS professor and director of its center for bioinformatics and computational biology (CBCB). My research is focused on developing and harnessing computational systems biology approaches for the genomic analysis and genome scale metabolic modeling (GSMM) of cancer. My lab collaborates with several experimental cancer labs, aiming to utilize computational approaches to jointly gain a network-level integrative view of the systems we study, and predict and test novel drug targets and biomarkers to treat cancer more selectively and effectively. My lab has developed the first GSMM models of metabolism of different human tissues [1], identified the first GSMM-based synthetic lethal drug target to treat renal cancer [2], has been the first to identify synthetic lethal networks in cancer in a genome-wide manner [3], and together with our experimental collaborators, has recently identified the essential role of aspartate in ASS1-deficient tumors [4].

1. T. Shlomi, M.N Cabili, M.J. Herrgard, B.O. Palsson, E. Ruppin (2008). Network based prediction of human tissue specific metabolism. Nature Biotechnology, 26(9),1003-1010, 2008. Highlighted by Nature Biotechnology in 2011 as one of the most important advances they published in the last 5 years.

2. C. Frezza, ... ,T. Shlomi, E. Ruppin, E. Gottlieb (2011). Haem oxygenase is synthetically lethal with the mitochondrial tumour suppressor fumarate hydratase. Nature, 17 Aug 2011, doi:10.10.1038/nature10363. Highlighted in Nature Reviews Cancer, October 2011. 

3. L. Jerby-Arnon, N. Pfetzer, Y.Y. Waldman, L. McGarry, D. James, E. Shanks, B. Seashore-Ludlow, A. Weinstock, T.Geiger, P. A. Clemons, E. Gottlieb, E. Ruppin (2014). Predicting cancer-specific vulnerability via data-driven detection of synthetic lethality. Cell, 158, 1199–1209, August 28, 2014.

4.  4. S. Rabinovich,L. Adler, K. Yizhak, A. Sarver, A. Silberman, S. Agron, N. Stettner, Q. Sun, A. Brandis, D. Heibling, S. Korman, S. Itzkovitz, D. Dimmock, I. Ulitsky, S. CS. Nagamani, E. Ruppin, A. Erez (2015).
Diversion of aspartate in ASS1-deficient tumors fosters de novo pyrimidine synthesis
Nature,  527, 379-383, 2015.