Mayo Clinic Hepatobiliary SPORE Diversity Supplement Dr. Musa Gabere

Abstract public domain (NIH RePORTER)

STATEMENT OF CANDIDATE ELIGIBILITY AND DIVERSITY Dr. Musa Gabere is a permanent resident of the United States (Green card number: 063-359-769) of African descent. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Nairobi. He then moved to South Africa, where he completed post-graduate diploma, Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy. Dr. Gabere is interested in applying genetics and bioinformatics approaches to identify common biomarkers that can be used to develop targeted therapies for hepatobiliary cancers. In particular, he will train in understanding the transcriptome changes in hepatocarcinoma treated with immunovirotherapy, a new class of immunotherapeutic. He will be mentored by Dr. Mitesh J. Borad (Primary mentor), Dr. Richard G. Vile (Co- mentor), and Dr. Lewis Roberts (co-mentor) as part of the parent grant 5P50CA210964-03 (P.I. Dr. Richard G. Vile). The overall goal of Dr. Gabere is to pursue research in cancer genetics. Dr. Gabere will participate in various training in Mayo Clinic. These include training in virotherapy, immunotherapy, translational research and ethics. Additionally, there are weekly meetings in cancer, where he can learn and interact with Mayo Clinic Cancer Center senior investigators. In addition, to this, Dr Gabere will have the opportunity to work with large cancer genetics datasets with experts in liver and pancreatic cancer research. These datasets include but not restricted to whole genome, exome, methylome, metabolome and transcriptome for various cancers such as Cholangiocarcinoma. Dr Gabere will also have opportunity to mentor and supervise PhD students and visiting scientists to identify of antigens both in-silico and functional assays. The diversity grant will also allow Dr. Gabere to increase the number of racial and ethnic minorities who participate in biomarker discovery and clinical trials. This will allow Dr Gabere to inform and educate the minorities in the importance of clinical trials and early cancer screening. It is expected that upon receipt of the Diversity Supplement, Dr. Gabere will be able to generate vital data and apply for extramural funding, such as the care award (R21) at the end of his second year.

Public health relevance public domain (NIH RePORTER)

PERSONAL STATEMENT OF THE CANDIDATE Background: Dr. Gabere completed one-year postdoctoral training at Mayo Clinic, Department of Neurology on June 31st, 2020. He was under the umbrella of Dr. Keith Josephs and Dr. Jennifer Whitwell. Prior to his postgraduate studies, Dr. Gabere completed his undergraduate studies in Kenya and graduated with a first- class honor in Mathematics. Subsequently, he was awarded scholarship to pursue a postgraduate diploma in Mathematical sciences at Stellenbosch University in South Africa from 2004-2005. After the postgraduate diploma, he received a full scholarship to pursue a Master of Science in Computational and Applied Mathematics at the University of Witwatersrand from 2005-2007. Finally, he completed his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics under the supervision of the late Prof Vladimir Bajic and Prof Alan Christoffels at the University of Western Cape. His Ph.D. thesis was on prediction of antimicrobial peptides using optimized hyperparameters of the support vector machine. The antimicrobial peptides he predicted showed activities against viral, bacterial and fungi diseases. In particular, he built a webserver for predicting antimicrobial peptides in Glossina Morsitans species. Research on system biology and development of therapies: Dr. Gabere worked on determining the biologically relevant genes that were involved in colorectal cancer by using a feature selection approach based on minimum redundancy maximum relevancy coupled with various machine learning approaches such as support vector machines, artificial neural network, Naïve Bayes and Random Forest. In addition, he worked on understanding system biology vis-à-vis heat stroke. He has also developed therapeutics agents to treat Middle East Respiratory Syndrome using antimicrobial peptides. This work has been patented. Career Goals: In the next two years, Dr. Gabere’s research will focus on understanding the transcriptome changes in Hepatocarcinoma patients undergoing Phase I clinical trials subjected to immunovirotherapy. This is important in identifying biomarkers for prediction of prognosis and response to oncolytic viral therapy and immunotherapy. This will lay the foundation for applying R-series grants to understand the important biomarkers for subsequent clinical trials in relation cancer patients’ treatment. In the long-run, the career goals of Dr. Gabere is to establish an independent research program in the field of personalized medicine in cancer by (1) gaining independence by securing both intramural and extramural funding, (2) publishing high-quality work that contributes to development of personalized medicine (3) expanding collaboration efforts in the field and (4) expanding knowledge base to new and emerging technologies in cancer genetics and bioinformatics analyses. Sincerely, 11/26/2020 Musa Gabere, Ph.D.