Robert B. Darnell

Robert Bernard Darnell (born October 29, 1957) is an American neurooncologist and neuroscientist, founding director and former CEO of the New York Genome Center, the Robert and Harriet Heilbrunn Professor of Cancer Biology at The Rockefeller University, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research into rare autoimmune brain diseases led to the invention of the HITS-CLIP method to study RNA regulation, and he is developing ways to explore the regulatory portions—known as the "dark matter"—of the human genome.

At The Rockefeller University Darnell is head of the Laboratory of Molecular Neuro-Oncology, has been an HHMI Investigator since 1992, and an Adjunct Attending Neuro-Oncologist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was named to the New York Genome Center position on November 28, 2012, a position he held through 2016. His publications can be found via Google Scholar and his ORCID ID 0000-0002-5134-8088.

Career Darnell's early research was concentrated on paraneoplastic syndromes (PNDs, the paraneoplastic neurologic disorders), disorders touching on various clinical and basic aspects of biology including cancer immunology and neuroimmunology. He was the first to definitively demonstrate that naturally occurring tumor immunity in humans was caused by antigen-specific cytotoxic (CD8+) T cells, helping to generate the foundation for the field of immuno-oncology. His lab was the first to use PND patient antisera to screen expression cDNA libraries to identify the genes encoding the PND antigens. This opened the door to the cloning of the Nova, cdr2 and Elavl (Hu) antigens, and led Darnell to hypothesize, based on the intracellular nature of the antigens, that tumor immunity was mediated by CD8+ T cells. His laboratory went on to prove this hypothesis, demonstrating cdr2-specific CD8+ T cells were present in the peripheral blood of patients with paraneoplastic cerebellar degeneration associated with tumor immunity to breast or ovarian cancers.

The discovery of that the Nova PND antigen (associated with paraneoplastic opsoclonus-myoclonus ataxia) was the first of a class of neuron-specific RNA-binding proteins led his laboratory to question the nature of RNA regulation in the brain and why it might be co-opted in cancer cells. His laboratory developed the HITS-CLIP technique that is used to map the sites of regulatory interactions between RNA-binding proteins and their target RNA sequences, originally using it to study the Nova proteins (associated with intellectual disability and autism), RbFox (associated with autism), Mbnl (associated with myotonic dystrophy), Elavl (the Hu PND antigen) and cancer (including RBM47 and Argonaute-miRNA interactions, both implicated in breast cancer).

In 2012, Darnell became the founding director and CEO of the New York Genome Center, a not-for-profit multi-institutional academic collaborative founded to harness big data, molecular genetics to improve clinical care in an ethical and equitable manner. The center opened in September 2013 with support and participation from James Watson, Harold Varmus, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Marc Tessier-Lavigne and many others, growing within 2 years to bring a world-class genomic center to New York. In 2016 NYGC was one of four Genome Centers in the United States to be awarded a large grant from the NIH to use genomic sequencing to study common diseases. After securing a $100M philanthropic grant for NYGC and a seven-year Research Program Award from NINDS, In 2010 he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science), in 2014 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2019 he was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Personal life Darnell comes from a family of scientists; he is the son of American scientist James E. Darnell, another pioneer in RNA research, the father of Alicia Darnell, an assistant professor at the Duke Cancer Institute, and second-place winner in the 2007 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, as well as the father of Andrew J. Darnell, MBA, who completed a master's in Bioethics and Science Policy at Duke and graduated from Duke Law School in 2019.

Darnell is a passionate amateur cellist; he studied with Gilda Barston, herself a student of Leonard Rose, and Ardith Alton at Juilliard. In 2000, after his mother died of breast cancer, Darnell founded the Chamber Orchestra of Science and Music at Rockefeller University in her honor, saying in an interview with the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Clinical Scientist Award for Translational Research: "I love to breathe in music and art...seeing the intensity others put into life is a source of inspiration".

Darnell is also a triathlete, completing the New York City Olympic Triathlon every year since 2012-2022, the NJ Olympic Triathon since 2023; Darnell completed the Atlantic City Ironman in 2019.

Awards 1996 Irma T. Hirschl Trust Career Scientist Award 1998 American Neurological Association Derek Denny-Brown Young Neurological Scholar Award 2000 Burroughs Wellcome Fund Clinical Scientist Awards in Translational Research 2010 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2010 Member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences 2010 Member of the Association of American Physicians 2012 National Institutes of Health Director's Transformative Research Award 2014 Member of the National Academy of Sciences 2015 CUMC & NYP Distinguished Service Award 2017 NINDS Research Program Award 2019 Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences