John Prensner
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johnprensner.bsky.social
John Prensner
@johnprensner.bsky.social
Pediatric neuro-oncologist, Asst Prof U-Michigan | Cancer researcher | RNA & ribosome enthusiast | Broad Institute, DFCI alum | book & music & tea lover | Dad | Views are mine (he/him). https://prensnerlab.org
Reposted by John Prensner
Nice to see strong support in Congress: “In an 82-15 vote, the Senate approved a minibus budget bill to fund agencies involved in science and the environment, among other issues, through Sept. 30. The bill passed in the House last week by a vote of 397 to 28.” www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...
Congress passes bill to fund U.S. science agencies, rebuffing Trump's requested cuts
The Senate voted to provide billions more to NASA, NOAA and the National Science Foundation than the president had asked for.
www.nbcnews.com
January 16, 2026 at 6:14 PM
Time for some fun!
A lovely paper on mathematical oncology.

🧪

#Math
#Cancer
#CANsky

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
75 Years of Mathematical Oncology
Mathematics has long provided a quantitative framework to interpret cancer biology and treatment. Driven by richer biological and clinical data, the field has evolved into a multidisciplinary and translational endeavor - giving rise to Mathematical Oncology. Yet, the field's strong interdisciplinarity obscures a comprehensive view of its evolution, as well as the boundaries between Mathematical Oncology and adjacent domains. Here, we address this gap through a comprehensive bibliometric analysis spanning 75 years of mathematical research in oncology. Using a manually curated corpus (~1,500 papers) and a large query-based dataset (~19,000 papers), we map the field's conceptual and collaborative development over time. Independent analyses reveal sustained growth, high impact, and pronounced interdisciplinarity, together with a gradual shift from fundamental cancer biology toward therapeutic modeling. This reorientation underpins the emergence of Mathematical Oncology as a distinct field, separate from Systems Biology and Pharmacokinetics / Pharmacodynamics. We show how diverse concepts interlace within Mathematical Oncology, bridging applied mathematics, optimal control, evolutionary theory, and imaging. Collectively, we demonstrate that Mathematical Oncology is not merely the application of mathematics to cancer, but the use of interpretable models integrating clinical, biological, and physical knowledge to improve screening, understand disease evolution, guide therapy, and strengthen forecasting. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. NCI, U54CA274507 Wenner-Gren Stiftelserna/the Wenner-Gren Foundations, WGF2022-0044 Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas, RP220225 National Science Foundation, DMS 2436499 MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and ERDF/EU, PID2023-146347OA-I00 MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and ESF+, RYC2022-036010-I
www.biorxiv.org
January 16, 2026 at 1:34 PM
Ann Arbor- where even the buses love to think about alternative polyadenylation sequences.

#RNAsky
January 16, 2026 at 12:15 AM
#ChildhoodCancer advocates-
This is a powerful piece on the negative impact of Trump administration policies on children with brain cancer, written by a spouse who lived this horror.

#DMG/DIPG
#ETMR
#Medulloblastoma
#PEDCAN

www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
Kids with brain cancer were already in a life and death struggle. Then came Trump
The US president vowed to ‘end childhood cancer’. But his administration is dismantling the search for a cure and sending families scrambling for treatment
www.theguardian.com
January 15, 2026 at 12:04 PM
Reposted by John Prensner
Read our full statement by AAP President Dr. Andrew Racine on today’s HHS announcement about the childhood immunization schedule: www.aap.org/en/news-room...
January 5, 2026 at 9:16 PM
Introducing you all to @mishamehta.bsky.social who has spent tireless hours advocating for children with brain tumors, supporting researchers doing their work, and building community for other families.

We are indebted to her: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r_7...

#PEDCan
#CanSky
#CancerSurvivors
January 4, 2026 at 6:14 PM
Reposted by John Prensner
A new #ScienceAdvances study shows that commercial whaling in the Southern Ocean over the past century reduced the genetic diversity—and possibly the evolutionary fitness—of the region’s humpback whales. https://scim.ag/4anxPpM
Humpback whale genomes reflect the increased efficiency of commercial whaling
Humpback whale genomes reflect shifts in whaling practices and their potential impact on the animals’ adaptive capacity.
scim.ag
December 24, 2025 at 7:12 PM
Reposted by John Prensner
Happy to share our (@erin-schuman.bsky.social, @mpibrain.bsky.social) latest preprint „Brain-wide synaptosome profiling reveals localized mRNAs that diversify synapses“ (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...).
Brain-wide synaptosome profiling reveals localized mRNAs that diversify synapses
Chemical synapses are the principal communication nodes of the brain, defined by their specialization and plasticity. Their diversity spans multiple levels, from the polarity and magnitude of electrop...
www.biorxiv.org
December 10, 2025 at 1:07 PM
Reposted by John Prensner
My lab is hiring a postdoc (ERC funded)! If you're interested, get in touch!
December 18, 2025 at 8:36 AM
Wow this is a seriously serious supplementary figure from @cellpress.bsky.social today. Panels A through UU.

I get that Cell likes to minimize the number of supplementary figures. But is this really what is happening here?

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
December 17, 2025 at 12:25 PM
Reposted by John Prensner
New paper “Proteome-wide model for human disease genetics” is now live at Nature Genetics: rdcu.be/eRu7K
popEVE (pop.evemodel.org) finds the needles in the haystacks of human genetic variation:
November 24, 2025 at 2:53 PM
Reposted by John Prensner
The room is
almost all
elephant.
Almost none
of it isn’t.
Pretty much
solid elephant.
So there’s no
room to talk
about it.

-Kay Ryan, “The Elephant in the Room”
#everynightapoem
November 13, 2025 at 12:13 AM
So honored to take this position with @wearecbtn.bsky.social and it will be delightful to work on behalf of the pediatric brain tumor community!
CBTN welcomes new Scientific Co-Chair, John Prensner of University of Michigan. His work in data-driven discovery is shaping the next era of pediatric brain tumor research.
🔗 https://monkeylink.co/c0c2ec
November 11, 2025 at 12:31 PM
Reposted by John Prensner
Very well done story on 60 Minutes about the harms of grant terminations and freezes at Harvard with Joan Brugge, Don Engbar, David Liu, and a very compelling young cancer patient, now cured with Liu's technology.

Transcript and video here

www.cbsnews.com/news/researc...
Battle between Trump and universities hurting scientific research in need of federal funding
Federal research funding to universities has fueled breakthroughs for years. The White House is pressuring universities to align with the president's political agenda, or risk losing their funding.
www.cbsnews.com
November 10, 2025 at 1:03 AM
Reposted by John Prensner
The R2 platform : Democratizing bioinformatics through an easily accessible public online software platform for non-experts in the field of Genomics

r2platform.com

#genomics #datascience #expertise #fair #public #science #bioinformatics #nocode #tcga #gtex #depmap
November 2, 2025 at 9:10 PM
Reposted by John Prensner
💬 Viewpoint: The evolving health care landscape necessitates a new clinician-scholar paradigm incorporating humanities and social sciences to address complex challenges and enhance scientific inquiry and health outcomes.

ja.ma/4qtBLL0
November 2, 2025 at 11:00 AM
Reposted by John Prensner
I feel like I’m going to reference this all the time. A+ meme.
Same, Shohei.
October 28, 2025 at 9:46 AM
Reposted by John Prensner
Fred Hutch's Human Biology Division is recruiting an Assistant or Associate Professor to lead a laboratory-based research program focused on the biological mechanisms of solid tumor cancers and their clinical translation. Learn more and apply: https://apply.interfolio.com/174007
October 25, 2025 at 5:16 PM
Reposted by John Prensner
In 1983, the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour became the nation’s first hour-long nightly broadcast of national news, says Deema Zein.
October 23, 2025 at 11:59 AM
Just an afternoon in Ypsilanti, Michigan with a thousand friends. #NoKings
October 18, 2025 at 7:48 PM
Reposted by John Prensner
Check out our new paper @jci.org

High 4E-BP-1 expression associates with chromosome 8 gain and CDK4/6 sensitivity in Ewing Sarcoma

www.jci.org/articles/vie...

We show that chr8 gains drive poor outcome in EwS via 4E-BP-1

@dkfz.bsky.social
@nct-heidelberg.bsky.social
@uniheidelberg.bsky.social
JCI - High 4E-BP-1 expression associates with chromosome 8 gain and CDK4/6 sensitivity in Ewing Sarcoma
www.jci.org
October 17, 2025 at 6:31 PM
Reposted by John Prensner
The pangenome resources and genome assembly/inference approaches we are building will eventually enable complete, personalized “T2T” genomes for everyone. This is the thesis of the Q100 project (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...) and what my group is currently working towards. Stay tuned... [10/10]
A complete diploid human genome benchmark for personalized genomics
Human genome resequencing typically involves mapping reads to a reference genome to call variants; however, this approach suffers from both technical and reference biases, leaving many duplicated and ...
www.biorxiv.org
October 13, 2025 at 8:17 PM
Reposted by John Prensner
Happy to share work spearheaded by former grad student Colin Shew testing shared duplicated cis regulatory elements (CREs) using an MPRA. While we find some high effect CREs, collectively paralog differences represent modest effects accounting for observed gene expression divergence.
Influence of cis-regulatory elements on regulatory divergence in human segmental duplications https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.03.680410v1
October 7, 2025 at 2:31 AM