Vittorio Cristini

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Vittorio Cristini, Ph.D.

PRESENT TITLES

  • Professor of Computational Biology and Mathematics in Medicine, 2022-present
Department of Medicine, The Houston Methodist Research Institute
  • Professor and Chairman, Mathematics in Medicine Program, 2018-present
The Houston Methodist Research Institute
  • Professor, Population Health Sciences, 2021-present
Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University
  • Professor, Physiology, Biophysics and Systems Biology, 2021-present
Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University, 2017-present
  • Adjunct Professor, Department of Imaging Physics
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

Business Address: Houston Methodist Research Institute, R8-123, 6670 Bertner Avenue, Houston Texas- 77030, Email: vcristini@houstonmethodist.org, Phone- 505-934-1813

SHORT BIOGRAPHY AND PERSONAL STATEMENT

Since July 2018, I have been with the Houston Methodist Research Institute (HMRI) as Professor and Chairman of the Mathematics in Medicine Program, while my academic appointments are as Professor of Physiology, Biophysics and Systems Biology at Cornell University Medical School and Professor of Computational Biology and Mathematics in Medicine at the Department of Medicine of Houston Methodist. I am also member of the graduate program and of the promotion and tenure committee at both institutions. Finally, I am currently an Adjunct Professor of Imaging Physics at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. In the past decades, by focusing on clinical translation of mathematical and biophysical models, I have established multiple local, national, and international collaborations, in order to combine forces and work towards multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary studies. More recently, my team has established several collaborations with research scientists and clinicians at the HMRI in different fields of interest, including immunoncology (Dr. Shu-hsia Chen), and clinical translational cancer research (Drs. Jenny Chang, Esnaola Kai and Bernicker, Houston Methodist Cancer Center). These collaborative efforts have resulted in the development of several successful grant applications. Over the years, I’ve also served as consultant or independent contractor for a number of pharma and biomedical device companies and as CFO for a neuroimaging society.[2]

Scientific recognition

The collaborations and scientific output throughout the years have brought me international recognition as a “thought leader” of research excellence and leadership in the fields of mathematical and computational biology, applied and computational mathematics, physical oncology, complex fluids and microfluidics, and multidisciplinary (bio)materials science. In 2014, I was honored to be recognized ISI Highly-Cited Researcher in Mathematics, and had the privilege to be named one of the World’s “most influential scientific minds,” shared with less than 100 mathematicians worldwide. In my 27 years in research, I have also had the privilege to serve as editor for several scientific journals, including Cancer Research, NeuroImage, Frontiers, and PLOS Computational Biology, I have published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, and two book monographs with Cambridge University Press in 2010 and with CRC Press in 2017. I have served as consultant and board member for a number of private companies3, and on several faculty committees at various academic institutions.

My work has been recognized through various awards, nationally and internationally. I was the first recipient of the “Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in Fluid Dynamics” by the American Physical Society in 2000 for my PhD thesis in Chemical Engineering at Yale University. My 2005 paper in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology was in the top 0.1% of citations in the field of Mathematics and has been designated as a “New Hot Paper in the field of Mathematics” by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Knowledge; two articles have been featured in the Cancer Research Highlights of the American Association for Cancer Research. My research has been highly recognized internationally and by the media and several science museums in the US, and has been supported by the Cullen Trust for Health Care, Artidis corporation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, and the States of California, Texas, and New Mexico, among others.

Funding and strategic development

Over the past 20 years, I have continually served in PI roles on several NSF, NIH, and DoD grants focused on the development of predictive multi-scale, patient-specific computational models of tumor growth and mechanistic mathematical models of tumor response to chemo/immunotherapy, targeted therapy, and nano-therapeutics, most notably as part of multi-institutional grants including two NSF and joint NSF/NIGMS grants (funded in September 2017 and 2013, respectively), two R01s beginning in April and July 2018, two U01 NCI grants on pancreatic and gynecological cancers (funded in August 2015 and July 2017, respectively), two NCI Physical Sciences in Oncology Centers (PS-OC), one NCI Center for Excellence in Cancer Nanotechnology (CCNE), of which I also served as the overall PI in 2015-2016, one NCI Integrative Cancer Biology Program (ICBP) center grant, and one NIGMS P50 grant in systems biology, several additional R01s and one SPORE grant. At UCI, UNM, UTHealth, and HMRI I have developed and taught novel courses in Computational and Precision Biomedicine, and have mentored and trained graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty, including mentees in the NIGMS Spatio-Temporal Modeling Center (STMC UNM) and the NIGMS-IRACDA Academic Science Education and Research Training (ASERT) program, Weil-Cornell Graduate School, and Rice University Applied Physics. I have also established important collaborations with industrial partners as well, including ARTIDIS (a company based in Basel, Switzerland), and AstraZeneca. One of the major goals behind this type of strategic network of preclinical and clinical collaborations with mathematical, physical scientists, and engineers is to develop new intellectual property (IP) centered around mathematical interpretation of clinically relevant data methods to predict and optimize therapy outcome.

Modeling-supported clinical translation

I pioneered the field of “Physical Oncology”, which aims at using mathematical modeling, physical theories, and engineering approaches to describe and quantify biological mechanisms that play important roles in the growth of cancer and in response to therapies. With a solid background and experience in Applied Mathematics and Chemical Engineering, and specifically in the development of theories and numerical methods in Complex Fluids and Materials, I am dedicated to applying and adapting engineering and physical sciences approaches to the modeling of complex normal and pathologic biological tissue. One important approach I have been leading is focused on investigating the effects of diffusion, perfusion, and transport phenomena on cancer growth and dissemination rate, and on the development of resistance to drug or other systemic therapies. All the models and approaches developed within this framework integrate input from patient and experimental data (ACS Nano 2013, PLOS Computational Biology 2013, 2016, PLOS One 2013, 2016, Scientific Reports 2018, Nature Communications 2018, JCI Insight 2019). These efforts have been supported by the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Physical Science in Oncology (PS-OC) and the Center for Excellence in Cancer Nanotechnology funding mechanisms (three U54s funded) and regular R01-type funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. In line with this type of work, I have also made important discoveries on the role of physical transport in drug resistance in patients (JCI 2014, PNAS 2013, 2016, Clin Cancer Res 2018, Science Advances 2020, Nature BME 2021, ELife 2022). Currently, a first-of-kind effort is underway at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Baylor College of Medicine, and the Houston Methodist Cancer Center, towards the development of prospective clinical trials (and retrospective clinical studies) based on my mathematical models of physical transport in tumors to elucidate the role of physics in overall resistance to cancer chemotherapy and immunotherapy drugs.

My translational modeling effort is part of an ongoing collaboration with biologists, oncologists, and nanotechnologists at MD Anderson Cancer Center (Drs. Anirban Maitra, Gabriel Lopez-Berestein, Anil Sood, David Hong, Jen Wargo, George Calin, Bulent Ozpolat, Eugene Koay, Subrata Sen, James Welsh, Mary Edgerton, John Hazle, Ahmed Kaseb, and Christopher Crane among the others), Moffitt Cancer Center (Drs. Jason Fleming, Daniel Anaya), Baylor College of Medicine (Drs. Alastair Thompson, Michael Lewis, and Jeff Rosen), UNM (Drs. Jeffrey Brinker, Elaine Bearer, Cheryl Willman), Rutgers University (Drs. Wadih Arap, Renata Pasqualini, Daniela Staquicini), Stanford University School of Medicine (Dr. Sam Gambhir), USC School of Medicine (Dr. David Agus), and Houston Methodist (Drs. Haifa Shen, Shu-hsia Chen, Alessandro Grattoni, and others). To properly account for the purely biological phenomena affecting this tissue physics, we developed data-driven cell signaling and molecular interaction models, including under the umbrella of the NCI ICBP program (one additional U54 funded) in collaboration with the Baylor College of Medicine and also in collaboration with UNM (Cancer Res 2009a,b, Physical Biology 2012, PLOS Comput Biol 2016).

Education and outreach

As a scientific leader, I also contributed to developing outreach and education initiatives to promote novel approaches and results coming from the field of physical oncology. In particular, with the support of the NCI, we have developed a series of educational workshops (most notably: The Ohio State University workshop on “The role of biomedical informatics in overcoming current barriers in cancer research” 2008; and the National Cancer Institute meeting: “Integrating and Leveraging the Physical Sciences to Open a New Frontier in Oncology” 2008). These efforts led to the creation of the PS-OC program by the NCI. An introduction to this new field was developed in my book monograph on multiscale mathematical modeling of tumor growth, Cambridge University Press (2010). A second monograph, titled “An Introduction to Physical Oncology”, was published by CRC Press in 2017, where new mathematical models of physical transport processes (including our recent modeling work) that use patient tissue and imaging data to predict the efficacy of 6mmune/chemotherapy and radiation therapy are introduced and discussed.

In my career, I have also had the pleasure to serve as mentor to ca. 100 trainees, including graduate students, postdocs and junior faculty, and many of them have gone on to successful research and academic careers (e.g., Dr. Paul Macklin, Indiana University; Dr. Steven Wise, The University of Tennessee; Dr. Hermann Frieboes, University of Louisville; Dr. Jennifer Pascal, University of Connecticut, Drs. Wang, Dogra, Nizzero and Butner, HMRI). My current research group is highly interdisciplinary, and includes undergraduate students, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, research associates, and junior faculty in the field of biophysics, applied physics, engineering, statistics, mathematical modeling, imaging, and immunology.

References

  1. ↑ Dr Cristini’s name is often misspelled in citations so the official figures are underestimate
  2. ↑ Consulting history available upon request
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