About

the lab hikes Will Roger’s state park, March 2022

LUNE visits Will Roger’s state park, March 2022.

LUNE team dinner, August 2022.

LUNE visits Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, July 2022.

LUNE visits Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, July 2022.

Bruce Ruff is a runner up for the poster competition

Bruce Ruff presented a poster at the SURP symposium, summer of 2023

Mohamad, Emily, and Anjali attend BMEs in Seattle in 2023

Mohamad is selected for a conference talk at BIC in San Diego in June of 2024

Summer group meeting 2024

Emily, Youzi, Anjali, Mohamad, and Madis attend BIC in San Diego in June of 2024

The Lab for the Understanding of Network Effects (LUNE) aims to model drug effects. Drugs are traditionally developed to alter the function of proteins within cells – usually proteins that are malfunctioning and have causal relationships to disease. However, proteins in the cell exist in large, complex networks – they interact with each other and rarely exist in isolation. Even well designed drugs that alter the function of a target protein have ripple effects through protein networks. It’s widely appreciated that drug effects propagate through protein networks, but the downstream effects are not routinely considered during target protein selection. We are building protein network models to first understand the downstream effects of current drugs with the aim of later designing models to rationally select new protein targets with their downstream consequences in mind.