Dr. Prasenjit Dey

Dr. Prasenjit Dey joined the faculty of Immunology at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in August 2019 as an Assistant Professor of Oncology/Immunology. Prasen earned his MS in Clinical Chemistry at Manipal University, India and a PhD in Biochemistry in the laboratory of Dr. Jan-Ake Gustafsson at University of Houston, TX. During his graduate studies, he was one of the first to identify FOXO3a as transcriptionally regulated by estrogen receptor (ER) beta. Decreased expression of ERbeta in prostate cancer leads to downregulation of FOXO3a resulting in increased proliferation (Dey, et al. Oncogene, 2014). He further demonstrated that ERbeta splice variants have opposite roles in prostate cancer (Dey, et al. Molecular Endocrinology, 2012) and also showed that ERbeta2, a splice variant interacts with HIF1alpha for its oncogenic function (Dey, et al. PlosOne, 2015).

Dr. Dey conducted his postdoctoral fellowship in Dr. Ronald DePinho’s laboratory at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX. Here he identified a specific vulnerability in a sub-set of pancreatic cancer patients where malic enzyme 2 is homozygously co-deleted along with the tumor suppressor gene SMAD4 (Dey, et al. Nature, 2017). He then continued his research on the theme of precision medicine and has co-authored a paper on mutual exclusivity of CHD1 and PTEN in prostate cancer (Zhao, et al., Nature, 2017). He along with others has demonstrated that Yap1 mediated regulation of MDSC in prostate cancer (Wang et al. Cancer Discovery, 2016). He also co-authored a paper on Kras regulation of tumor microenvironment in colorectal cancer (Liao et al. Cancer Cell, 2019) and a paper on novel function of p53 in SMARCB1 deficient tumors (Carugo et al. Cancer Cell, 2019). At the same time, he co-authored a comprehensive review on the genetics and biology of pancreatic cancer (Ying, et al. Genes and Development, 2016).

Dr. Dey’s laboratory has specific research interest in elucidating novel therapeutic strategies that involves metabolic and cytokine pathway targets with a goal to identify alternative therapeutic strategies to target hard to treat cancers. His broad research interests include tumor metabolism, cytokine biology, and immuno-metabolism. Dr. Dey’s laboratory is funded by grants from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Additionally, Dr. Dey has received numerous awards and honors that include a Department of Defense (DoD) Postdoctoral Fellowship.