Annamarie Allnutt

Bio:

I graduated from UC San Diego in 2017 with a B.S. in Physiology and Neuroscience. During my undergraduate years I worked in the biopharmaceutical industry and assisted in drug metabolism and pharmacokinetic studies. After graduating, I moved to Los Angeles and worked in the medical field for two years before returning to the laboratory. Upon re-entering into biomedical research, I worked as a Research Associate at Saint John’s Cancer Institute for 2.5 years in the Translational Neurosciences and Neurotherapeutics department where I aided in the development of novel small molecule and immuno- therapeutic strategies for glioblastoma, grade IV brain cancer. I started my PhD in Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA in 2021 and joined the lab of Thomas Graeber for my thesis work. My project is focused on identifying therapeutic strategies to effectively target cancers carrying extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA). More specifically, I am looking at how the unique molecular regulation of ecDNA strains cellular resources and elicits stress responses that can be exploited to induce cell death with small-molecule therapies. Ultimately, my project aims to identify pan-cancer ecDNA induced stress-response mechanisms and develop a therapeutic strategy with pan-cancer efficacy. My project involves a combination of multi-omics bioinformatics analysis, in vitro mechanistic studies, and high-throughput small molecule screening.