By Daniah Beleford, MD, PhD, FACMG
Daniah Beleford is a board-certified clinical geneticist and physician scientist with a research interest in rare genetic vascular diseases (diseases that affect normal arterial, venous, and lymphatic development). She completed the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, MN in 2014, earning both an MD and PhD in biomedical sciences (biochemistry and molecular biology) for her detailed study of the serine protease High temperature requirement A3 (HtrA3) in lung cancer. She completed both residency and fellowship in Medical Genetics and Genomics at UCSF in 2018. She was appointed as a Clinical Instructor of Pediatrics, Division of Medical Genetics, in 2018 and was promoted to Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at UCSF in 2022.
Dr Beleford completed her post-doctoral research studies in vascular biology and human genetics in Rosemary Akhurst’s Lab in the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCSF in 2023. Her project examined the underlying genetic causes of vascular malformations in Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT), a rare genetic vascular disease. She was awarded a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship for her study of the role of the genetic modifier PTPN14 in BMP9 and Hippo signaling in HHT.
Dr Beleford was recruited to UC Davis as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Division of Genomic Medicine, and Assistant Professor of Physiology and Membrane Biology in January 2023. Her independent research program investigates genetic causes of abnormal endothelial cell signaling in vascular diseases. Her clinical practice includes pediatric and adult patients with general genetic conditions with an emphasis on patients with vascular conditions. She is also the Medical Director for Genetics for patients with sex chromosome aneuploidies and disorders of sexual development and is the Medical Director of a dedicated Adult Genetics clinic at the UC Davis MIND Institute. She has been awarded the UC Davis CAMPOS Faculty Scholarship, the Western Society for Pediatric Research Young Investigator Award, and an Academic Pediatric Association Scholarship since joining UC Davis.
Dr Beleford is a graduate of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where she majored in Biology with a concentration in Genetics and Development. She grew up in the Bronx and is a first-generation college graduate. When she is not working, she enjoys spending time with her family at their home in Rancho Cordova, CA.
We spoke to Dr Daniah Beleford about her role as one of the first editors appointed to the editorial board for The Journal of Precision Medicine: Health and Disease in 2024.
As a medical geneticist who completed residency and fellowship in 2019, precision medicine is a term that dominated my training. It represented the goal towards which all of medicine was striving, with genetics and genomics and the ever-improving technologies that enabled us to identify single nucleotide changes that impacted human disease at the forefront of these efforts. Now, there may not be any field of medicine that does not utilize genomic data to better diagnose and treat patients. With long read sequencing and optical genome mapping now included in clinical whole genome sequencing and other techniques such as ATAC-seq (Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin Sequencing), widely used in research but not yet validated for clinical use, genomics has brought us even closer to the ultimate goal of personalized medicine based on our genetic risk factors and molecularly confirmed pathogenic genetic variants with remarkable accuracy. However, advances in medicine cannot be made without an intricate knowledge of the science of disease.
For this reason, I was excited to learn about The Journal of Precision Medicine: Health and Disease and honored to serve as one of the first editors appointed to the editorial board. The opportunity to advance novel, cutting edge science that informs health and disease has been invaluable. That the Journal centres precision medicine is also directly aligned with what many truly believe is needed to transform human health and our ability to treat disease. My own research program focuses on the developmental genetics of vascular physiology and genomic causes of vascular malformations. My lab seeks to understand how normal vascular development is regulated and how derangements in this regulation cause vascular anomalies. We ultimately hope to develop novel therapies for vascular disease. The Physiological Society has given me varied opportunities to meet other vascular scientists and physicians, exchange ideas, and develop my burgeoning research program within the Departments of Pediatrics and Physiology & Membrane Biology at the University of California, Davis. I have also gained crucial insights into the treatment of vascular anomalies that are identified in a large number of my patients from other Society members. The Society is clearly positioned at the intersection of physiology and personalized healthcare, a position that aligns with my career goals and advances healthcare for everyone.