Jill P. Mesirov, Ph.D.

UC San Diego, School of Medicine
UC San Diego, Moores Cancer Center

Professor of Medicine, Division of Medical Genetics;
Associate Vice Chancellor for Computational Health Sciences;
Co-Lead, Structural and Functional Cancer Genomics Research Program;

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Research in the Mesirov Lab focuses on cancer genomics applying machine-learning methods to functional data derived from patient tumors. The lab analyzes these molecular data to determine the underlying biological mechanisms of specific tumor subtypes, to stratify patients according to their relative risks of relapse, and to identify candidate compounds for new treatments. The overall goal is to treat patients as individuals specific to their tumors. Importantly, the lab is committed to the development of practical, accessible software tools to bring these methods to the general biomedical research community. The tools support over 900,000 users worldwide.

Recent Featured Publications

    2025

    • Garg B, Khan S, Courelli AS, Panneerpandian P, Sheik Pran Babu D, Mose ES, Gulay KCM, Sharma S, Sood D, Wenzel AT, Martsinkovskiy A, Rajbhandari N, Patel J, Jaquish D, Esparza E, Jaque K, Aggarwal N, Lambies G, D'Ippolito A, Austgen K, Johnston B, Orlando DA, Jang GH, Gallinger S, Goodfellow E, Brodt P, Commisso C, Tamayo P, Mesirov JP, Tiriac H, Lowy AM. MICAL2 Promotes Pancreatic Cancer Growth and Metastasis. Cancer Res. 2025 Jan 2. doi: 10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-24-0744. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 39745352.

    2024

    • Klemm JD, Singer DS, Mesirov JP. Transforming Cancer Research through Informatics. Cancer Discov. 2024 Oct 4;14(10):1779-1782. doi: 10.1158/2159-8290.CD-24-0604. PMID: 39363746; PMCID: PMC11463720.

    2023

    • Chapman OS, Luebeck J, Sridhar S, Wong IT, Dixit D, Wang S, Prasad G, Rajkumar U, Pagadala MS, Larson JD, He BJ, Hung KL, Lange JT, Dehkordi SR, Chandran S, Adam M, Morgan L, Wani S, Tiwari A, Guccione C, Lin Y, Dutta A, Lo YY, Juarez E, Robinson JT, Korshunov A, Michaels JA, Cho YJ, Malicki DM, Coufal NG, Levy ML, Hobbs C, Scheuermann RH, Crawford JR, Pomeroy SL, Rich JN, Zhang X, Chang HY, Dixon JR, Bagchi A, Deshpande AJ, Carter H, Fraenkel E, Mischel PS, Wechsler-Reya RJ, Bafna V, Mesirov JP, Chavez L. Circular extrachromosomal DNA promotes tumor heterogeneity in high-risk medulloblastoma. Nat Genet. 2023 Dec;55(12):2189-2199. doi: 10.1038/s41588-023-01551-3. Epub 2023 Nov 9. PMID: 37945900; PMCID: PMC10703696.
    • Castanza AS, Recla JM, Eby D, Thorvaldsdóttir H, Bult CJ, Mesirov JP. Extending support for mouse data in the Molecular Signatures Database (MSigDB). Nat Methods. 2023 Nov;20(11):1619-1620. doi: 10.1038/s41592-023-02014-7. PMID: 37704782; PMCID: PMC11397807.
    • Wu VH, Yung BS, Faraji F, Saddawi-Konefka R, Wang Z, Wenzel AT, Song MJ, Pagadala MS, Clubb LM, Chiou J, Sinha S, Matic M, Raimondi F, Hoang TS, Berdeaux R, Vignali DAA, Iglesias-Bartolome R, Carter H, Ruppin E, Mesirov JP, Gutkind JS. The GPCR-Gαs-PKA signaling axis promotes T cell dysfunction and cancer immunotherapy failure. Nat Immunol. 2023 Aug;24(8):1318-1330. doi: 10.1038/s41590-023-01529-7. Epub 2023 Jun 12. PMID: 37308665; PMCID: PMC10735169.
    • Robinson JT, Thorvaldsdottir H, Turner D, Mesirov JP. igv.js: an embeddable JavaScript implementation of the Integrative Genomics Viewer (IGV). Bioinformatics. 2023 Jan 1;39(1):btac830. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btac830. PMID: 36562559; PMCID: PMC9825295.
    Publications

Open Positions

  • Bioinformatics Scientist

    The Mesirov Lab at UC San Diego seeks an exceptional candidate who is passionate about accelerating the pace of cancer research through the analysis of genomic data and making sophisticated computational methods available to the research community at large through advanced, accessible software tools.

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