Apoorva Baluapuri

Mammalian genes are long because their introns have been expanded by millions of short repeat insertions. Transcribing one from start to end is a difficult journey for RNA polymerase II (RNAPII), the enzyme that makes mRNA, which needs different supporting factors at each stage.
Apoorva Baluapuri's doctorate at the University of Würzburg established how MYC oncoproteins control the assembly of these factors under tumour stress (Baluapuri et al., Mol Cell 2019; Baluapuri et al., Nat Rev MCB 2020; Solvie*, Baluapuri* et al., Nature 2022). In Karen Adelman's laboratory at Harvard Medical School he turned to the reverse question. When a factor is lost, RNAPII stops inside an intron and releases an incomplete RNA that folds into double-stranded RNA (dsRNA). The cell mistakes it for a virus and responds by activating the integrated stress response (ISR). Losing the Integrator complex sets off exactly this sequence in cells from patients with neurodevelopmental disorders (Baluapuri et al., Cell 2025).
Are human neurons, which transcribe the longest genes in the genome, the most exposed? Apoorva's group at the Helmholtz Pioneer Campus, supported by the DFG Emmy Noether Programme, works on both sides of the problem: how this failure causes disease in neurons, and how dsRNA can be weaponised against tumour cells.