From bench to desk: How the Donnelly Centre’s newest scientist will shape his space
Khalid Al-Zahrani's office only has three objects. There is a laptop on his desk, a half-full can of ginger ale, and a small house plant near his south-facing window. His new lab in the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research looks similar to his office: the shelves, desks, and benches wait to be occupied.
“I'm excited to see the empty space start to fill up,” he says, “slowly but surely."
In September, Al-Zahrani began his role as an Assistant Professor and Principal Investigator in the Donnelly Centre at the University of Toronto. His walk to work is a minute shorter than his previous commute to the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI) at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he completed his postdoctoral research in the laboratories of Drs. Daniel Schramek and Jeff Wrana.
His work focused on basal-like breast cancer, the most aggressive subtype of breast cancer which predominantly affects younger, premenopausal patients. He developed an extension of the gene-editing tool CRISPR, to observe how changes in a living organism’s chromosome impacts tumour onset and formation.
With Al-Zahrani's novel use of the CRISPR system, scientists can activate tumour-promoting genes and deactivate tumour-suppressing genes in live mouse models. These chromosomal alterations allow researchers to study and pinpoint the specific genes that drive tumourigenesis, the process in which healthy cells gain the malignant properties of cancerous cells.
Al-Zahrani calls the technology CRISPR-iKOALA, an acronym for Inhibition, Knock-Out, and Activation Linked Assay.
“We're just scratching the surface—we've applied this to basal-like breast cancer, but there's an ocean of sequencing data that exists,” says Al-Zahrani. “We can apply the same principles that we used in our pilot experiments to now tackle other cancers and start to uncover new potential therapeutic targets.”
Personalized therapy in the future might look like a patient coming to a clinic to have their DNA sequenced from a tumour sample, says Al-Zahrani. CRISPR-iKOALA could be used to generate more comprehensive lists of cancer-specific drivers and vulnerabilities, allowing for targeted therapies.
Leveraging functional genomics applications in that vision of personalized cancer care is the future the Al-Zahrani Lab will work towards.
“On behalf of all of the Donnelly Centre’s faculty, I want to extend a warm welcome to Dr. Al-Zahrani,” says Stephane Angers, the Director of the centre. “We’re all excited to see the discoveries his team will make in the next few years.”
For the time being, Al-Zahrani is focused on settling in and setting up his lab. He has plans for the space; from the expensive screening technology he’ll bring over from his old building, to the bowl of sour candy he'll keep on his desk. He’s reserved a corner spot in his office for his infamous going-away presents from the Schramek and Wrana Labs: a Red Bull mini fridge and coffee maker, respectively.
During this liminal phase of adjustment and rebuilding, as Al-Zahrani learns the inner workings of running a lab, his colleagues and peers ground him.
“That's what that drawing is,” he says, pointing to a figure on the whiteboard in his office. “Rafa [Montenegro Burke] was explaining how one of his data sets might involve my research. All of a sudden, there's potentially a way to collaborate—everyone has been so helpful and welcoming since day one. It’s becoming obvious that this is how Donnelly operates.”
Near his new colleague’s explanation is a cartoon mouse, drawn by Ellen Langille, an old friend from his postdoctoral work at LTRI. The whiteboard is a microcosm of the old and the new parts of Al-Zahrani's life coming together while he builds his lab. Now that he’s on the other side of the desk, he’s most looking forward to mentoring students and guiding others through their eureka moments.
“One of the students I work with sent me a message reading, ‘you'll never believe this data,’ and for the thirty seconds it took me to run to the microscope, she's the only person in the world that knew that piece of science,” Al-Zahrani says. “To me, that's the coolest part of it. I only hope that coming through my lab at Donnelly is rewarding and helps my students succeed in whatever they want to do in life."
A casual passerby might describe Khalid Al-Zahrani's office as barren. He describes it as full of potential. Eventually, over many years, colleagues, students, and stories will fill the space. It begins with a blank whiteboard and an empty office.
