Background
Dr. Bedalov cares for adults with blood cancers and blood disorders, including patients undergoing blood and marrow transplant. In his clinical practice, he focuses on treating hematologic malignancies and helping patients navigate complex cancer therapies.
Dr. Bedalov’s research focuses on chromatin, the material that makes up chromosomes inside cells. Chromatin helps control how genes are turned on and off, which plays an important role in normal development, aging and cancer formation. His work explores how changes to chromatin affect key processes in the cell nucleus and how disruptions in these processes can lead to disease.
His research includes three main areas. First, Dr. Bedalov studies how cells control the transcription and replication of repetitive DNA sequences and what happens when these processes break down. Second, he is developing potential cancer drugs known as sirtuin inhibitors, which affect how cells regulate gene expression. Dr. Bedalov and his collaborator Dr. Julian Simon identified the first sirtuin inhibitors, including one that showed strong cancer-killing effects in laboratory studies. Third, he studies X-chromosome inactivation, a process in which cells in females silence one of their two X chromosomes. He is interested in whether this process could be manipulated as a treatment for Rett syndrome, a genetic disorder caused by a malfunctioning gene on one X chromosome.
By combining patient care with laboratory research, Dr. Bedalov works to translate discoveries about basic cell biology into future therapies for cancer and other diseases.
Area of Clinical Practice
Adult blood and marrow transplantation, hematologic malignancies
