Home / Muralidharan Anbalagan, PhD
Dr. Anbalagan received his Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Environmental Toxicology from the University of Madras, Tamil Nadu, India in 2005. He came to the U.S. in 2005 as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, working on the molecular biology of prostate cancer and the role of calcitonin and its receptor. In 2007, he joined the Department of Structural and Cellular Biology at Tulane University School of Medicine (SOM) as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Brian Rowan’s laboratory, investigating the effects of the novel peptidomimetic dual Src and pre-tubulin inhibitor KX-01 in experimental models of breast cancer. During this period, Dr. Anbalagan acquired expertise using mouse xenograft and bone metastatic cancer models, imaging small animals (bioluminescent, fluorescent, and X-Ray), and various molecular techniques. He is the director of the Small Animal Imaging Core (IVIS-XRMS) at Tulane SOM. In 2014, he was promoted to instructor and became Histology Lab Director for T1 medical students. Dr. Anbalagan has published over 30 peer-reviewed research articles and review papers. He is a reviewer for a variety of journals, including Cancer Letters, Journal of Pineal Research, PLOS ONE, and Scientific Reports. In 2018, Dr. Anbalagan was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Structural and Cellular Biology. In collaboration with the Tulane Circadian Biology Center, Dr. Anbalagan studied the impact of circadian disruption of melatonin signal by dim light exposure at night on breast cancer metastasis to bone. Through a fellowship from the Louisiana Clinical and Translational Science Center (LACaTS), he studied bone biology under the guidance of Dr. Alexander Robling at the Indiana University School of Medicine. His most recent work on estrogen receptor alpha (ERα) phosphorylation has used CRISPR/Cas9 to create breast cancer cell lines with mutations in ERα phosphorylation sites to study its impact on endocrine therapy. Dr. Anbalagan’s current research is focused on determining the possible role of ERα signaling in sex differences in pulmonary fibrosis.
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