Benjamin Hopkins

I am the Director of the Organoid Platform of the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine. The overarching goal of my research program is to use functional modeling techniques to identify and elucidate the molecular mechanisms that underpin tumor specific drug sensitivities so that they can be exploited in the clinic. Specifically, my research program focuses on the use of patient derived tumor organoid models to study the effects of small molecule inhibitors and genetic perturbations upon therapeutic responses in cancer. To accomplish this goal, over the last ten years I have worked with teams at both the Icahn School of Medicine and Weill Cornell to develop functional genomics/precision oncology pipelines that integrate multi-omics with functional modeling in order to identify and understand tumor specific drug sensitivities. This approach is a natural extension of the work I did as a graduate student at Columbia University in the Laboratory of Ramon Parsons, which focused on a translational variant of Phosphatase and Tensin Homolog (PTEN), using xenograft and genetically engineered mouse models of cancer to examine a novel therapeutic approach for PTEN mutant tumors ; and the work I did as a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Lewis Cantley studying tumor signaling and therapeutic responses in the context of precision medicine . My team at the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine, has developed workflows to study patients derived organoid models in order to compare alternative therapeutic regimens and both identify effective therapeutic strategies for individual patients, as well as the best patient population for emerging therapeutics.