Andrew Hong, MD

Since starting my lab in March 2020 at Emory University and the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, I have focused my research on shedding light to the rare and understudied cancers. This is building from my initial efforts as a postdoctoral fellow where I developed cell line and patient derived xenograft models from patients with rare pediatric cancers and used functional genomics to identify novel therapeutic targets. This work continues today where my lab is now specifically focused on using omics (e.g., long read sequencing, epigenome and transcriptome at bulk and single cell resolution) with functional genomics to study pediatric brain cancers with alterations in the chromatin remodeling complex, SWI/SNF. Our R01 funded work is geared towards understanding the biology and mechanisms of SMARCB1 mutations based on our deep mutational scanning efforts.

Combined with my role as the Renal Tumors Committee Biology Chair in the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) and larger efforts with the NIH X01 Common Fund Gabriella Miller Kids First program, we embrace the concept of the beach lab where trainees are expected to learn both computational biology as well as laboratory-based techniques. Furthermore, I am the PI for the Rare Diseases Research Program’s Pattern platform where we pair patients to researchers by ensuring that we can help patients around the country provide their tissue samples to researchers focused on a particular rare disease.