Research Focus  

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As a clinical scientist my goal is to bring effective and tolerable treatments to patients with blood cancers. My research program, aims to target dependency on metabolism in cancer. Many novel agents are being developed and combined with excellent efficacy but challenges with tolerability. In addition, novel agents are entering clinical practice and we are now seeing resistance arise in the most effective treatments. Many of the resistance patterns are secondary to increases oxidative phosphorylation as the survival mechanism of these cells. My program focuses on the evaluation of small molecules or approved compounds on mitochondrial metabolism in cancer cells using primary cells or cell lines models using a suspension based method to evaluation oxygen consumption. With this platform we aim to identify candidates compounds to move from pre-clinical to in vivo testing. We design combination therapies and evaluate dose reduction strategies in vitro and ex vivo.

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Dr. Versha Banerji's Background 

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Dr. Versha Banerji graduated from the University of Manitoba with an B.SC. in 1997, completed a Pre-masters in Physiology in 1998 and an M.D. in 2002. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Manitoba from 2002-2005. She then completed her clinical fellowship specializing in Hematology at the Internal Medicine at the University of Manitoba from 2005-2007. Subsequently, she completed a research fellowship focusing in Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML) gene expression based drug discovery and target validation in Pediatric Oncology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute/ Harvard Cancer Centre and the Broad Institute of MIT located in Boston, Massachusetts from 2007-2011. 

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Dr. Banerji joined the University of Manitoba in 2011 as an Clinician Scientist in the Department of Internal Medicine, section of Hematology and oncology and as a Senior scientist at the Research Institute of Oncology and Hematology- conducting research primarily in hematologic malignancies. She is currently one of the Senior Investigators for the Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) research team in CancerCare Manitoba’s Research Institute of Cell Biology and an Assistant Professor in the Rady faculty of Health Sciences in Biochemistry and Medical Genetics and the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Manitoba. She is also an Adjunct Professor of Biology at the University of Winnipeg. Dr. Banerji has received grant support from a total of 12 local, provincial and federal agencies, totaling to 2.8 million Canadian dollars in funding. With over 50 peer reviewed publications consisting of original research, editorials, chapters, and abstracts, her work was published in many  high impact journals including The Lancet, Blood Journal, Blood Advances, Leukemia, British Journal of Hematology, Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers Prevention, International Journal of Cancer, Journal of Biological Chemistry.

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Her main goals are bring the most effective and safest therapies to patients by evaluating the role of metabolism in in cancer using mitochondrial respiration as a biomarker for disease and response to therapy.​

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WHY is Dr. Versha Banerji's Research Important?

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To find new ways to target cancer cells, leverage cancer cell metabolism to develop new treatments or re-purpose or combine existing ones, and bring safe and effective treatment options to patients.

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CLL Seminar 

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Other Links: ​​

Leukemia & lymphoma Society of Canada VB Page 

CCMB VB Page ​ 

UofM Internal Medicine Wiki Page

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