RobertBDarnellMDPhD

Summary

• Robert Darnell is the Heilbrunn Professor of Cancer Biology at The Rockefeller University and has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 2002. He is Senior Physician at the RU Hospital and an Adjunct Attending Neuro-Oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. His work on disease mechanisms of paraneoplastic neurologic degenerations (PNDs), manifest by tumor immunity and autoimmune brains disease, and together with his clinical mentor Jerome Posner co-authored the authoritative book on PNDs. His translational work led to the basic discovery that neurons have unique systems for regulating RNA metabolism, and the development of CLIP, now the gold-standard method to study RNA regulation in vivo, with which he has made breakthrough contributions to our understanding of neurologic disease including Fragile-X intellectual disability and autism. Dr. Darnell is the Founding Director and CEO emeritus of the New York Genome Center, a not-for-profit academic consortium, where between 2013-2016 he organized a Board of Directors headed by the Presidents of 12 major academic medical centers, raising nearly $300M to build and equip a state-of the art genome center, 12 Full time and Associate faculty members, including Harold Varmus, and hire a team of over 200 to run the basic and clinical sequencing, compute and informatics facility. He raised academic funds from many sources, including as Principle Investigator of an NIH-funded grant for the NY Center for Collaborative Research in Common Disease Genomics ($44.5M). His work has been recognized by numerous awards, including the Derek Denny- Brown Neurological Scholar Award, the Burroughs Wellcome Clinical Scientist Award in Translational Research, and the NIH Directors Transformative Research Award. He is a Member of both the National Academies of Sciences and of Medicine, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Robert B. Darnell, MD, PhD | HHMI
Robert Darnell wants to understand how proteins regulate RNA and thereby affect gene expression. Darnell and his team are particularly interested in neurons--

Robert Darnell is an American neurooncologist and neuroscientist, founding director and former CEO of the New York Genome Center, the Robert and Harriet Heilbrunn Professor of Cancer Biology at The Rockefeller University,^[5] and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research into rare autoimmune brain diseases led to the invention of the HITS-CLIP method to study RNA regulation, and he is developing ways to explore the regulatory portions—known as the "dark matter"—of the human genome.^[6]
At The Rockefeller University Darnell is head of the Laboratory of Molecular Neuro-Oncology,^[5] and Senior Physician at the Rockefeller University Hospital,^[7] has been an HHMI Investigator since 1992,^[8] and an Adjunct Attending Neuro-Oncologist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was named to the New York Genome Center position on November 28, 2012 a position he held through 2016.^[9] His publications can be found via Google Scholar and his ORCID ID 0000-0002-5134-8088.
Darnell's early research was concentrated on paraneoplastic syndromes (PNDs, the paraneoplastic neurologic disorders), disorders touching on various clinical and basic aspects of biology including cancer immunology and neuroimmunology. He was the first to definitively demonstrate that naturally occurring tumor immunity in humans was caused by antigen-specific cytotoxic (CD8+) T cells, helping to generate the foundation for the field of immuno-oncology.^[10] His lab was the first to use PND patient antisera to screen expression cDNA libraries to identify the genes encoding the PND antigens.^[11][12] This opened the door to the cloning of the Nova,^[13] cdr2 and Elavl (Hu) antigens, and led Darnell to hypothesize, based on the intracellular nature of the antigens, that tumor immunity was mediated by CD8+ T cells.^[14] His laboratory went on to prove this hypothesis, demonstrating cdr2-specific CD8+ T cells were present in the peripheral blood^[10] and cerebrospinal fluid^[15] of patients with paraneoplastic cerebellar degeneration associated with tumor immunity to breast or ovarian cancers.
Robert B. Darnell
Robert Darnell is an American neurooncologist and neuroscientist, founding director and former CEO of the New York Genome Center, the Robert and Harriet Heilbru