Email

dere@bcm.edu

Positions

Associate Professor

Medicine
Center for Precision Environmental Health
Baylor College of Medicine
Houston, TX US

Education

PhD from Texas A&M University

05/2006 - College Station, Texas United States

Genetics

Postdoctoral Fellowship at U.T. MD Anderson Cancer Center

08/2011 - Smithville, Texas United States

MS from Mumbai University

05/2000 - Mumbai

Life Sciences

BS from St. Xavier's College

05/1998 - Mumbai, India

Life Sciences

Professional Statement

The focus of my research centers on elucidating the molecular mechanisms involved in regulating primary cilia formation and disassembly. Loss and/or defects of the primary cilium are directly linked to a large number of diseases termed ‘ciliopathies’, and are causally linked to renal cystogenesis. We have shown that loss of the von Hippel Lindau (VHL) tumor suppressor is directly linked to ciliary defects arising from the activation of Aurora kinase A (AURKA), which in a non-mitotic role regulates ciliary disassembly. We have identified AURKA as a direct target of VHL’s E3 ligase activity and have demonstrated that inhibition of the AURKA-HDAC6 signaling axis rescues the ciliary defect both in vitro and in vivo using an animal model of cystogenesis that we have recently established. In addition, we have now developed a high-throughput image-based ciliation assay, which enables the screening of small molecule probes to identify compound(s) that can rescue ciliary defects. More recently, our interest in ciliary dynamics has lead to the discovery of nuclear histone modifiers that are repurposed in the cytoplasm to regulate ciliary microtubule dynamics, identifying a previously unknown crosstalk between the epigenome and the cytoskeleton.

Websites