Randall Peterson

About

Randall T. Peterson, PhD, received his PhD from Harvard University, where he studied as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute predoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Stuart L. Schreiber. After completing his doctorate, he pursued a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Mark Fishman at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Peterson then spent 14 years as a faculty member at Harvard University, serving as an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, an Associate Biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a Senior Associate Member of the Broad Institute. In January 2017, he joined the University of Utah as the L.S. Skaggs Presidential Endowed Professor and Dean of the College of Pharmacy. Dr. Peterson's research focuses on drug discovery using living zebrafish as a screening platform to identify drug candidates that are active in vivo. His lab utilizes high-throughput screening technologies to discover new drug candidates for cardiovascular, nervous system, and metabolic disorders. Unlike conventional drug discovery programs that rely on simplified in vitro assays, the Peterson lab screens compounds in living zebrafish, ensuring biological relevance and activity. Several compounds discovered in his lab have become widely used research tools and preclinical drug candidates, highlighting the translational impact of his work.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Pharmacology
• Internal medicine
• Medicine
• Computational biology
• Chemistry
• Biochemistry
• Endocrinology
• Nanotechnology
• Biology

Selected publications

• A small-molecule allosteric inhibitor of BAX protects against doxorubicin-induced cardiomyopathy

  Nature Cancer · 2020 · 121 citations

  DOI

• MIC-Drop: A platform for large-scale in vivo CRISPR screens

  Science · 2021 · 80 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  CRISPR-Cas9 can be scaled up for large-scale screens in cultured cells, but CRISPR screens in animals have been challenging because generating, validating, and keeping track of large numbers of mutant animals is prohibitive. Here, we introduce Multiplexed Intermixed CRISPR Droplets (MIC-Drop), a platform combining droplet microfluidics, single-needle en masse CRISPR ribonucleoprotein injections, and DNA barcoding to enable large-scale functional genetic screens in zebrafish. The platform can eff…

  DOI

• Top2a promotes the development of social behavior via PRC2 and H3K27me3

  Science Advances · 2022-11-23 · 29 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Little is understood about the embryonic development of sociality. We screened 1120 known drugs and found that embryonic inhibition of topoisomerase IIα (Top2a) resulted in lasting social deficits in zebrafish. In mice, prenatal Top2 inhibition caused defects in social interaction and communication, which are behaviors that relate to core symptoms of autism. Mutation of Top2a in zebrafish caused down-regulation of a set of genes highly enriched for genes associated with autism in humans. Both th…

  PublisherDOI

• The 5α-reductase inhibitor finasteride reduces opioid self-administration in animal models of opioid use disorder

  Journal of Clinical Investigation · 2021 · 21 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Opioid use disorder (OUD) has become a leading cause of death in the United States, yet current therapeutic strategies remain highly inadequate. To identify potential treatments for OUD, we screened a targeted selection of over 100 drugs using a recently developed opioid self-administration assay in zebrafish. This paradigm showed that finasteride, a steroidogenesis inhibitor approved for the treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia and androgenetic alopecia, reduced self-administration of mult…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social behavioral profiling by unsupervised deep learning reveals a stimulative effect of dopamine D3 agonists on zebrafish sociality

  Cell Reports Methods · 2023-01-01 · 17 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  It has been a major challenge to systematically evaluate and compare how pharmacological perturbations influence social behavioral outcomes. Although some pharmacological agents are known to alter social behavior, precise description and quantification of such effects have proven difficult. We developed a scalable social behavioral assay for zebrafish named ZeChat based on unsupervised deep learning to characterize sociality at high resolution. High-dimensional and dynamic social behavioral phen…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• ADVANCING GENE-EDITING NUCLEASES FOR TARGETED GENOME MANIPULATION

  NIH · $4.5M · 2009–2018

• NIH Grant R01HL079267

  NIH · $1.5M · 2009

• Advancing Novel Cyanide Countermeasures

  NIH · $33.4M · 2019–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Calum A. MacRae

  164 shared

• David J. Milan

  Medical University of South Carolina

  100 shared

• Jing-Ruey Joanna Yeh

  Massachusetts General Hospital

  97 shared

• David Kokel

  University of California, San Francisco

  89 shared

• John D. Mably

  University of South Florida

  85 shared

• Jeffrey R. Winterfield

  Medical University of South Carolina

  81 shared

• Adam Amsterdam

  81 shared

• Serena Sanna

  National Research Council

  81 shared

Labs

• Randall T. Peterson LabPI

Awards & honors

• L.S. Skaggs Presidential Endowed Chair - College of Pharmacy

Similar researchers at University of Utah

• Dr. Peter J. Westh-94
• Karen S. Wilcoxh-42
• Philip J. Moosh-34