Grigor Varuzhanyan, PhD

Dr. Varuzhanyan studies how mitochondrial metabolism regulates lineage plasticity, therapeutic resistance, and metabolic vulnerabilities in small cell neuroendocrine and gynecologic cancers with treatment-induced neuroendocrine states. His work integrates functional genomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics, pharmacology, and computational analyses of large-scale cancer datasets to identify mitochondrial dependencies that drive tumor progression and treatment resistance. He is also interested in how alternative RNA splicing rewires mitochondrial function to create cancer-specific vulnerabilities that may be therapeutically exploited.

C.-C. Chen, W. Tran, K. Song, T. Sugimoto, M.B. Obusan, L. Wang, K.M. Sheu, D. Cheng, L. Ta, G. Varuzhanyan, et al., Temporal evolution reveals bifurcated lineages in aggressive neuroendocrine small cell prostate cancer trans-differentiation. Cancer Cell, 2023.

G. Varuzhanyan*, et al., PGC-1α drives small cell neuroendocrine cancer progression toward an ASCL1-expressing subtype with increased mitochondrial capacity. PNAS, 2024. *First and co-corresponding author.

E. Abt*, L. Wang*, G. Varuzhanyan et al., Synthetic lethality between RB-loss and E2F3 inhibition in small cell cancers targeted by pyrimidine synthesis blockade. PNAS, 2026.