# Andrea Califano

Andrea Califano is an American biologist. He is a Clyde and Helen Wu professor of Chemical and Systems Biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He also has roles in the Departments of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics, Biomedical Informatics, and Medicine. Califano serves as the president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York.

## Education and career

Califano earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Florence, Italy, in 1986. He then joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where he became the program director of the IBM Computational Biology Center in 1997. He joined Columbia University in 2003.
Califano serves on various editorial and scientific advisory boards, including the Board of Scientific Advisors of the National Cancer Institute, St. Jude Children's Hospital, Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.. He is also the co-founder and Chief Scientific Advisor of DarwinHealth.
Califano was appointed president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York in 2023.

## Research work

Califano is renowned for his work in reverse engineering gene regulatory networks and analyzing them to identify key tumor checkpoint modules. This research has led to several clinical trials, including an N-of-1 study that analyzes patients with 14 untreatable, lethal cancers individually to prioritize therapeutic strategies.

## Honors and awards (selected)

* NCI Outstanding Investigator Award (R35) in 2015 and 2022
* AAAS Fellow (2015)
* ISCB Fellow (2017)
* Member of the National Academy of Medicine (2018)
* 2019 Ruth Leff prize in pancreatic cancer research
* 2023 Alfred G. Knudson prize in Cancer Genetics.
* Fellow of the AACR Academy (2024)

## Selected publications

* Basso, Katia; Margolin, Adam A; Stolovitzky, Gustavo; Klein, Ulf; Dalla-Favera, Riccardo; Califano, Andrea (April 2005). "Reverse engineering of regulatory networks in human B cells". Nature Genetics. 37 (4): 382–390. doi:10.1038/ng1532. ISSN 1061-4036.
* Alvarez, Mariano J; Shen, Yao; Giorgi, Federico M; Lachmann, Alexander; Ding, B Belinda; Ye, B Hilda; Califano, Andrea (August 2016). "Functional characterization of somatic mutations in cancer using network-based inference of protein activity". Nature Genetics. 48 (8): 838–847. doi:10.1038/ng.3593. hdl:11585/657580. ISSN 1546-1718.
* Ding, Hongxu; Douglass, Eugene F.; Sonabend, Adam M.; Mela, Angeliki; Bose, Sayantan; Gonzalez, Christian; Canoll, Peter D.; Sims, Peter A.; Alvarez, Mariano J.; Califano, Andrea (16 April 2018). "Quantitative assessment of protein activity in orphan tissues and single cells using the metaVIPER algorithm". Nature Communications. 9 (1): 1471. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-03843-3. ISSN 2041-1723. PMC 5902599.
* A. Obradovic, L. Vlahos, P. Laise, J. Worley, X. Tan, A. Wang, et al. PISCES: A pipeline for the Systematic, Protein Activity-based Analysis of Single Cell RNA Sequencing Data. bioRxiv 2021 Pages 2021.05.20.445002. DOI: 10.1101/2021.05.20.445002
* Alvarez MJ, Subramaniam PS, Tang LH, et al."A precision oncology approach to the pharmacological targeting of mechanistic dependencies in neuroendocrine tumors". Nature Genetics. 50 (7): 979–989. July 2018. doi:10.1038/s41588-018-0138-4. hdl:10044/1/60492. ISSN 1546-1718.
* Mundi PS, Dela Cruz FS, Grunn A, et al. "A Transcriptome-Based Precision Oncology Platform for Patient-Therapy Alignment in a Diverse Set of Treatment-Resistant Malignancies". Cancer Discovery. 13 (6): 1386–1407. 2 June 2023. doi:10.1158/2159-8290.CD-22-1020. ISSN 2159-8290. PMC 10239356.
* Vasciaveo A, Arriaga JM, de Almeida FN et al. "OncoLoop: A Network-Based Precision Cancer Medicine Framework". Cancer Discovery. 13 (2): 386–409. 6 February 2023. doi:10.1158/2159-8290.CD-22-0342. ISSN 2159-8290. PMC 9905319.