Rockefeller University

Kıvanç Birsoy graduated in 2004 from Bilkent University’s Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. In 2009, he earned his Ph.D. at Rockefeller University. Between 2010 and 2015, he conducted postdoctoral research at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. In 2015, he established his own laboratory within Rockefeller University, and since 2022 he serves with the title of Associate Professor. With his innovative outlook and contributions to “Cell and Cancer Metabolism” as well as “Organismal Metabolism,” he has authored various publications and holds several patents. His work “Systematic Identification of Nutrient Dependencies in Cancer Cells” earned him the Sabri Ülker Science Award, once again reminding the scientific world of his name in capital letters.

Research Focus
Cancer cells frequently become dependent on specific nutrients due to oncogenic changes. Restricting the uptake or utilization of these nutrients carries the potential to disrupt cancer cell proliferation while allowing normal cells to survive — thus offering a strong basis for novel targeted therapies. By integrating nutrient dependencies with existing genomic information (such as gene expression, mutations, copy number variations), his approach aims to uncover molecular bases for potential nutrient dependencies and reveal previously unrecognized metabolic programs. Using the developed methods, responses from hundreds of cell lines under nutrient restriction can be rapidly processed, and this data can be correlated with public genomic datasets. Identifying specific nutrient dependencies across different cancers may open up new opportunities for anti-cancer strategies.