Andrea Ventura's Lab

02/26/2025

An anti-science culture leads to unnecessary deaths and suffering.

At least 124 cases of measles have been identified in Texas since late January, mostly among children and teenagers who are either unvaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown, officials say.

12/18/2024

New paper from our lab just published in Nature. It's been 4+ years in the making. But it was well worth the effort.
Fantastic team work from Davide, Minsi, Rui, and Melissa, with contribution from everybody else in the lab!

Large extrachromosomal DNAs are engineered using a CRISPR- and Cre–loxP-based approach and shown to drive cancer in mouse models, with potential applications in determining the role of oncogene amplifications in human cancers.

06/27/2023

Our latest work on engineering extrachromosomal circular DNAs (ecDNAs) is now available in bioRxiv. In this preprint we describe a novel strategy to engineer the formation of large (>1 Mbp), multigenic, amplifications mediated by ecDNAs in cells and mice. ecDNAs are large, circular DNA fragments that mediate focal amplifications in some of the most aggressive human cancers. ecDNA were described more than 60 years ago and they are known as "double minutes" for their appearance in metaphase spreads (see image)....

http://venturalaboratory.com/2023/06/27/ecdna-engineering-preprint/

Our latest work on engineering extrachromosomal circular DNAs (ecDNAs) is now available in bioRxiv. In this preprint we describe a novel strategy to engineer the formation of large (>1 Mbp), mul…

01/30/2023

Welcome to our new postdoc, Moritz Weigl!
Moritz was born and grew up in Amstetten, a small town in the ‘Mostviertel’ region of Lower Austria. He obtained his PhD in Biotechnology from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (Austria). His graduate studies on the role of microRNAs during aging and on using circulating microRNAs as new biomarkers of cellular senescence involved rotations through the labs of Johannes Grillari (LBI Trauma Vienna), Matthias Hackl (TAmiRNA GmbH Vienna) and James Kirkland (Mayo Clinic Rochester). Moritz joined the Ventura lab in 2023 and is intrigued by extracellular RNAs and whether they can be transferred between cell types and if so, what the implications for intercellular communication in the tumor microenvironment are. Outside of the lab Moritz enjoys hiking, playing tennis, going to concerts and apart from science he is interested in literature and history.