Lyssiotis Lab

🚨New @LyssiotisLab paper led by Dr. Megan Radyk in @NatureMetabolism "NADPH-producing enzymes restrict the formation of pancreatic precancerous lesions" 🧵Follow for a tweetorial... and bonus highlight of @LabVousden co-published study and News & Views link from @WellenLab!

New @Nature study: >50% of lung cancer metastases are seeded by other metastases, not the primary tumor. This "seeding from seeding" reveals a complex evolutionary cascade that allows cancer to colonize the body. nature.com/articles/s4158…

Congrats to the class of 2026, and welcome to our University of Michigan alumni family of 700,000 strong. Forever, #GoBlue! 🎓

Our lab is expanding and hiring both a postdoc and staff scientist! We study how metabolism and cell cycle states drive tumor progression, therapy response, and immune interactions. Philly is a great place to live and do research! See more at: airdlab.com.

"This is the first synthetic species,” microbiologist J. Craig Venter told 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft in 2010. His team of scientists created a synthetic bacteria designed on a computer, with man-made DNA. Venter says that from concept to completion, it took 15 years and $40 million to make. Venter, who died this week at 79, was one of the most famous scientists in the world, known for his pioneering work in deciphering the human genetic code.

We finally got the results of a trial of GLP-1s for alcoholism! At 26 weeks, alcoholics on semaglutide had 13.7pp fewer heavy drinking days than placebo, they drank ~500 fewer grams of alcohol/month, had 1.5 fewer drinks per drinking day, and saw 10.1pp more alcohol-free days!

Congrats to our award winners at our 2026 @UMPhysiology Bishr Omary Postdoctoral Fellow Program Symposium. Mariana Ruckert - Early Postdoc Research Award Micki Quintero - Teaching/Service Award Dominik Awad - Senior Postdoc Research Award Qiantao Zhang - Res Investigator Award

News from the @US_FDA for patients with metastatic #PancreaticCancer while the inevitable approval is happening for Daraxonrasib. nytimes.com/2026/05/01/bus…

Last evening we celebrated the installation of Filip Bednar, MD, PhD as the Maud T. Lane Research Professor in Surgical Oncology. A distinguished pancreatic surgeon, brilliant researcher and highly respected teacher and mentor. Congratulations, Dr. Bednar! @Fil_Bednar @timofran1 @LyssiotisLab @Pasca_Lab

Geneticist J. Craig Venter, best known for his role in sequencing the human genome, has died aged 79. He spoke to Nature in 2023 about AI, sequencing the ocean – and why he had no plans to stop working. go.nature.com/4tHEf9M

First randomized trial to show Ozempic reduces alcohol consumption in people seeking treatment for alcohol use disorder. Placebo-controlled, double-blind. Participants with BMI >30 kg/m2. thelancet.com/journals/lance… @TheLancet

52 new study sections are being created at the NIH CSR to manage the review of R01 grant applications grants.nih.gov/news-events/ni…

Over the past 34 years the average Chinese man became, on average, 3 inches taller than his grandfather. But entire population can't rewrite its DNA in 35 years. So what made them grow so fast? The answer might surprise you.

I came back to the United States, hearing about a very sad news: Craig Venter passed away today. He is a pioneer, successfully sequenced the first Human genome, and tried to create Synthetic Cells. We lost a giant in Science. RIP. @JCVenterInst

Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine. What went wrong? In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms: 1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder. 2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology. 3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it. The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress. This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does. Link to paper: michael-inzlicht.squarespace.com/s/The-psycholo…

A magnificent presentation from @DJCalebC, capping off a remarkable PhD 💪🏼 GOAT status 🐐 @Chinnaiyanlab, @yuanyuan_qiao, @UMCDB, @UMICHpancreas, @UMRogelCancer

Beyond grateful to share that my main PhD thesis project, Targeting PIKfyve-driven lipid metabolism in pancreatic cancer (@LyssiotisLab @ArulChinnaiyan), has just been published in @Nature! @UMRogelCancer @UMICHpancreas @UMichMedSchool @UMichPath @UMichResearch @UMichCMB

Kudos to Dr Dominik Awad (3rd from left) and Dr @ruckertmt (at left) for taking home the @UMPhysiology Senior and Junior Postdoc of the year awards! Super proud of them both 💪🏼😊 @UMICHpancreas, @UMRogelCancer

PNAS retracted Mariano Barbacid’s Dec 2025 paper on a triple therapy (daraxonrasib + afatinib + SD-36) that achieved complete pancreatic tumor regression in 45 mice. The sole reason: undisclosed financial stakes by Barbacid and two co-authors in Vega Oncotargets startup. Scientific findings were not challenged. The authors will resubmit with proper disclosure.

The discourse on GLP-1 is unhinged. Science brought a drug that : ⏬cardiovascular events reverses fatty liver ⏬kidney decline ⏬addictive cravings ⏬all-cause mortality And the worst, loudest part of the internet decides the real problem is that people are using it. /1

Sci-Hub is an evil website that pirated 85M+ research papers and made them freely available And now they've added AI to their database to make Sci-Bot. It answers your questions using latest, full-text articles. But DO NOT use it. We should all try to make billion-dollar academic publishers richer. I'm putting the link below so you know how to avoid it.