Supporting Oncology Research at Columbia University and CUNY

How do our cells know when they have enough oxygen – and when they are in trouble and need to adapt? A key sentinel in this process is hypoxia-inducible factor, or HIF, - an essential family of genetic regulators that changes its behaviour in response to oxygen levels. Because oxygen is so important to life, HIF is required to maintain proper functioning of cells in our body. However, HIF is also involved in diseases such as cancer where it is hijacked by tumor cells to promote their survival. Therefore, knowing how HIF works both in normal and in disease conditions is vitally important for biomedical research and for development of novel therapies to treat human diseases.

We are happy to announce that Orbion is teaming up with a veteran scientific team to help them study aspects of HIF biology. Dr. Joseph Garcia at the James J. Peters Veteran Affairs Medical Center and Columbia University, and Dr. Kevin Gardner at the City University of New York's Advanced Science Research Center, are interested in how different members of the HIF family behave in health and disease. Excitingly, the Orbion Astra AI models have already provided them with a hypothesis that can be tested in the laboratory – and this is only the beginning of our collaboration.