Chris McFarland

Chris is an Assistant Professor of Genetics & Genome Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. As a graduate student under the guidance of Prof. Leonid Mirny, Chris argued that tumors harbor many ‘deleterious passenger’ mutations that are harmful to cancer cells, yet nevertheless accumulate and alter progression. These mutations may be exploitable by both future and existing therapies. Chris joined the Petrov lab as a postdoc (2014-2019), and worked with folks in Monte Winslow’s lab to develop a high-throughput technology that combined DNA barcoding with CRISPR-based genome engineering to study the fitness effects of the tumor suppressor losses in mice. This approach discovered a rugged fitness landscape of context dependencies between drivers and formed the basis of an approach to study pharmacogenomic interactions in cancer. In collaboration with a graduate student in the lab, Susanne Tilk, Chris confirmed his predictions from graduate school that deleterious mutations are indeed accumulating in cancer and that the lack of signal of purifying selection in cancer genomes is due to the inability of selection to weed damaging mutations out rather than due to the fact that these mutations are not damaging to begin with. He was a CEGH fellow from 2014-2015 and Cancer Systems Biology Fellow (2015-2017), and received an NIH (NCI) K99/R00 award to carry out his work.