Kaitlyn M. Gayvert - PhRMA Foundation

I became interested in computational approaches to biomedical research early on in my undergraduate career, while pursuing a mathematics degree from the State University of New York at Geneseo. During this time, I was also exposed to applied mathematics research in biology under the mentorship of Drs. Christopher Leary, Caroline Haddad and Gregg Hartvigsen, investigating population and tumor growth modeling problems. I continued down this path at a Research Experience for Undergraduates program at North Carolina State University under mentorship of Dr. H.T. Banks, researching questions of disease modeling and algorithm selection. While I found this work in mathematics stimulating, I soon discovered that my true passion lies in translatable research. This led me to pursue my doctoral studies in computational biology, where I joined the Tri-Institutional Training Program in Computational Biology and Medicine in the cancer systems biology laboratory of Dr. Olivier Elemento at Weill Cornell Medicine.

At Weill Cornell, I became interested in how “Big Data”, such as large sequencing datasets and drug databases, can be leveraged and integrated to design better therapeutic options and predict drug toxicity. Under the PhRMA Foundation fellowship, I was able to develop methods for repositioning drugs to disrupt transcription factor activity and to predict clinical trial toxicity events. I have also worked on the molecular characterization of cancers, with a particular focus on Neuroendocrine Prostate Cancer. I am currently working on utilizing insights from the molecular characterization work to identify novel specific therapeutic targets, with a particular interest in immunotherapy-based discoveries. Additionally, I am working on translating my work on identifying toxic compounds to the prediction of specific adverse events.

Awards

2016 – Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare

2016 – Winner of Cornell Tech’s Health Tech Hackathon, Sponsored by Johnson and Johnson

2016 – Winner of Cornell Tech’s Data Science Hackathon, Sponsored by Capital One

2015 – F1000 Poster Prize Winner, New York Academy of Sciences Phenotypic and Biomarker-Based Drug Discovery Symposium

Publications Sponsored by the PhRMA Award

Dardenne E, Beltran H, Benelli M, Gayvert K, Berger A, Puca L, Cyrta J, Sboner A, Noorzad Z, MacDonald T, Cheung C, Gao D, Yu Chen Y, Eilers M, Mosquera J, Robinson BD, Elemento O, Rubin MA, Demichelis F, and Rickman D. N-Myc drives Aggressive Prostate Cancer with a Neuroendocrine Phenotype. Cancer Cell, 2016 Oct 10. pii: S1535-6108(16)30440-8. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ccell.2016.09.005

Gayvert K, Madhukar N, Elemento O. A data-driven approach to predicting successes and failures of clinical trials. Cell Chemical Biology, 2016 Sep 9. pii: S2451-9456(16)30291-4. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chembiol.2016.07.023

Gayvert K, Dardenne E, Cheung C, Boland MR, Lorderbaum T, Wanjala J, Chen Y, Rubin MA, Tatonetti N, Rickman D, Elemento O. A Computational Drug Repositioning For Targeting Oncogenic Transcription Factors. Cell Reports. June 2016; 15(11): 2348-56. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2016.05.037