Phedias Diamandis

At a Glance

• Protein-based approaches to resolving and targeting intra-tumoral heterogeneity in glioblastoma
• Modeling brain development and neurological disorders using cerebral organoids
• Designing cancer stem cell-specific therapies using chemical biology and mass spectrometry-based proteomics 
• Development of computer vision tools to automate large scale histopathologic image analysis 

Short Bio

Dr. Diamandis completed his combined MD/PhD and residency training in neuropathology at the University of Toronto. His graduate work focused on designing high-throughput screening platforms to chemically profile neural precursors. This work resulted in the identification of novel regulators of neural and cancer stem cell function.

Following the completion of his training in 2016, he was hired as a Neuropathologist at the University Health Network. He was appointed as a Scientist at Princess Margaret in 2019. Here, his research focuses on using chemical biology, deep learning and mass spectrometry-based proteomics to resolve phenotype-level heterogeneity in different brain and glioblastoma niches.  

Recent Publications

1. Diamandis P, Wildenhain J, Clarke ID, Sacher AG, Graham J, Bellows DS, Ling EK, Ward RJ, Jamieson LG, Tyers M & Dirks PB. Chemical genetics reveals a complex functional ground state of neural stem cells. Nature Chemical Biology2007; 3:268-73.
2. Diamandis P, Sacher AG, Tyers M & Dirks PB. New drugs for brain tumors? Insights from chemical probing of neural stem cells. Medical Hypotheses 2009; 72:683-7.
3. Diamandis P. The cost of autonomy: Estimates from recent advances in living donor kidney transplantation. Journal of Medical Ethics. 2010; 36:155-159.
4. Diamandis P. On the origins of physicians: Darwin or Lamarckian evolution? Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine. 2010; 48:1389-92.
5. Begcevic I, Kosanam H, Martínez-Morillo E, Dimitromanolakis A, Diamandis P, Kuzmanov U, Hazrati LN, Diamandis EP. Semiquantitative proteomic analysis of human hippocampal tissues from Alzheimer's disease and age-matched control brains. Clinical Proteomics. 2013;10:5.
6. Hazrati LN, Tartaglia MC, Diamandis P, Davis KD, Green RE, Wennberg R, Wong JC, Ezerins L, Tator CH. Absence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in retired football players with multiple concussions and neurological symptomatology. Frontiers Human Neuroscience. 2013; 7:222.
7. Diamandis P, Amato D, Finkelstein J, Keith J. 79-year old man with Parkinsonism and acute spinal cord compression. Brain Pathology. 2014 ;24:101-2
8. Keith J, Pirouzmand F, Diamandis P, Ghorab Z. Intraoperative cytodiagnosis of progressive multifocal leucoencephalopathy. Cytopathology. 2014; 25:59-61.
9. Thompson YY, Ramaswamy V, Diamandis P, Daniels C, Taylor MD. Posterior fossa ependymoma: current insights. Childs Nervous System. 2015 Oct;31(10):1699-706.
10. Diamandis P, Ferrer-Luna R, Huang RY, Folkerth RD, Ligon AH, Wen PY, Beroukhim R, Ligon KL, Ramkissoon SH. Case Report: Next generation sequencing identifies a NAB2-STAT6 fusion in Glioblastoma. Diagnostic Pathology. 2016 Jan 27;11(1):13
11. Bamaga AK, Riazi S, Amburgey K, Ong S, Halliday W, Diamandis P, Guerguerian AM, Dowling JJ, Yoon G. Neuromuscular conditions associated with malignant hyperthermia in pediatric patients: A 25-year retrospective study. Neuromuscular Disorders. 2016 Mar;26(3):201-6
12. Diamandis P, Chitayat D, Toi A, Blaser S, Shannon P. The pathology of incipient polymicrogyria. Brain Development. 2017 Jan; 39(1):23-39.
13. Djuric U, Zadeh G, Aldape K, Diamandis P. Precision Histology: How deep learning is poised to revitalize the H&E slide for personalized cancer care. NPJ Precision Oncology 2017 June 19; 1:22.
14. Diamandis P, Aldape KD. Insights from molecular profiling of adult glioma. Journal of Clinical Oncology. 2017 Jul 20; 35(21):2386-239
15. Djuric U, Rodrigues DC, Batruch I, Ellis J, Shannon P, Diamandis P. Spatiotemporal proteomic profiling of human cerebral development. Molecular and Cellular Proteomics. 2017 Sep;16(9):1548-1562.
16. Faust K, Xie Q, Han D, Goyle K, Volynskaya Z, Djuric U, Diamandis P. Visualizing histopathologic learning and classification by deep neural networks using nonlinear feature space dimensionality reduction. BMC Bioinformatics, 2018 May 16;19(1):173.
17. Diamandis P, Aldape K. World Health Organization 2016 Classification of Central Nervous System Tumors. Neurologic Clinics. 2018 Aug;36(3):439-447.
18. Xie Q, Faust K, Sheikh A, Djuric U, Van Ommeren, R, Diamandis P. Deep learning: personalizing medicine closer to the point of care Critical Review Clinical Laboratory Medicine. 2019 Jan;56(1):61-73.
19. Voisin MR, Ovenden C, Tsang DS, Gupta AA, Huang A, Gao AF, Diamandis P, Almeida JP, Gentili F. Atypical teratoid/rhabdoidsellar tumor in an adult with a familial history of a germline SMARCB1 mutation: case report and review of the literature. World Neurosurgery. 2019 Apr 17. pii: S1878-8750(19)31075-7.
20. Papaioannou MD, Djuric U, Kao J, Karimi S, Zadeh G, Aldape K, Diamandis P. Proteomic analysis of meningiomas reveals clinically-distinct molecular patterns. Neuro-Oncology. 2019 Aug 5;21(8): 1028-1038.
21. Sarwar S, Dent A, Faust K, Richer M, Djuric U, Ommeren RV, Diamandis P. International Perspectives on the Advent of Artificial Intelligence in Diagnostic Pathology. npj Digital Medicine 2019 Apr 26: 2:28
22. Mathieu F, Jiang F, Wilson J, Diamandis P, Choi D, Vajkoczy P, Fehlings M. Intradural metastasis from Cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma causing cauda equina syndrome. Canadian Journal of Neurol Sciences. 2019; 46;615-620. 
23. Faust K, Bala S, Ommeren RV, Portante A, Qawahmed RA, Djuric U, Diamandis P. Intelligent feature engineering and ontological mapping of brain tumour histomorphologies by deep learning. Nature Machine Intelligence, 2019; 1: 316–32 
24. Grenier K, Kao J, Diamandis P. Three-dimensional modeling of human neurodegeneration: Brain organoids coming of age Molecular Psychiatry, doi: 10.1038/s41380-019-0500-7, Aug. 2019.
25. Djuric U, Kao J, Papaioannou M, Jevtic SBatruch I, Diamandis P. Proteomic profiling of diffuse gliomas defines genomically and histopathologically relevant disease subtypes. Molecular and Cellular Proteomics, 2019; Oct;18(10):2029-2043.
26. Sikpa D, Fouquet JP, Lebel R, Diamandis P, Richer M, Lepage M. Automated detection and quantification of breast cancer brain metastases in an animal model using democratized machine learning tools. Scientific Reports. 2019 Nov 22;9(1):17333.
27. Karimi S, Zuccato JA, Mamatjan Y, Mansouri S, Suppiah S, Nassiri F, Diamandis P, Munoz DG, Aldape KD, Zadeh G. The central nervous system tumor methylation classifier changes neuro-oncology practice for challenging brain tumor diagnoses and directly impacts patient care. Clinical Epigenetics. 2019 Dec 5;11(1):18.
28. Kalra S, Tizhoosh HR, Shah S, Choi C, Damaskinos S, Safarpoor A, Shafiei S, Babaie M, Diamandis P, Campbell CJV, Pantanowitz P.  Pan-cancer diagnostic consensus through searching archival histopathology images using artificial intelligence. NPJ Digital Medicine. 2020 Mar 10;3:31.
29. Rodrigues DC, Mufteev M, Weatheritt RJ, Djuric U, Ha KCH, Ross PJ, Wei W, Piekna A, Sartori MA, Byres L, Mok RSF, Zaslavsky K, Pasceri P, Diamandis P, Morris Q, Blencowe BJ, Ellis J. Shifts in ribosome engagement impact key gene sets in neurodevelopment and ubiquitination in Rett syndrome. Cell Reports. 2020 Mar 24;30(12):4179-4196.e11.
30. Selvadurai HJ, Luis E, Desai K, Lan X, Vladoiu MC, Whitley O, Galvin C, Vanner RJ, Lee L, Whetstone H, Kushida M, Nowakowski T, Diamandis P, Hawkins C, Bader G, Kriegstein A, Taylor MD, Dirks PB. Medulloblastoma arises from the persistence of a rare and transient Sox2+ granule neuron precursor. Cell Reports. 2020 Apr 14;31(2):107511.
31. Schomacher M, Jiang F, Alrjoub M, Witiw CD, Diamandis P, Fehlings MG. The posterior cervical transdural approach for retro-odontoid mass pseudotumor resection: report of three cases and discussion of the current literature. European Spine Journal. 2020 Dec; 29(Suppl 2): 162-170.
32. Diamandis P, Prassas I, Diamandis EP. Antibody tests for COVID-19: drawing attention to the importance of analytical specificity. Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine. 2020 Jun 25;58(7):1144-1145.
33. Roohi A, Faust K, Djuric U, Diamandis P. Unsupervised machine learning in pathology: the next frontier. Surgical Pathology Clinics. 2020 Jun;13(2):349-358.
34. Malcolm J, Fiala C, Djuric U, Diamandis P. Can gliomas provide insights into promoting synaptogenesis? Molecular Psychiatry. 2020 Sept; 25(9): 1920-1925.
35. Dasgupta A, Moraes FY, Rawal S, Diamandis P, Shultz DB. Focal leptomeningeal disease with perivascular invasion in EGFR-mutant non-small-cell lung cancer. American Journal of Neuroradiology. 2020 Aug; 41(8): 1430-1433.
36. Kalra S, Tizhoosh HR, Choi C, Shah S, Diamandis P, Campbell CJV, Pantanowitz L. Yottixel - an image search engine for large archives of histopathology whole slide images. Medical Image Analysis. 2020 Oct;65:101757.
37. Faust K, Roohi A, Leon AJ, Leroux E, Dent A, Evans AJ, Pugh TJ, Kalimuthu SN, Djuric U, Diamandis P. Unsupervised Resolution of Histomorphologic Heterogeneity in Renal Cell Carcinoma Using a Brain Tumor-Educated Neural Network. JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics. 2020 Sep;4:811-821
38. Lam KHB, Valkanas K, Djuric U, Diamandis P. Unifying models of glioblastoma's intratumoral heterogeneity. Neuro-Oncology Advances. 2020 Aug 11;2(1)
39. Papaioannou MR, Sangster K, Sajid RS, Djuric U, Diamandis P. (2020). Cerebral organoids: emerging ex vivo humanoid models of glioblastoma. Acta Neuropathologica Communication. 2020 Dec 1;8(1):209.
40. Samuel N, So E, Djuric U, Diamandis P. Consumer-grade electroencephalography devices as potential tools for early detection of brain tumors. BMC Medicine. 2021; Jan 22; 19(1) 16.
41. Alsafwani N, Alrjoub M, Djuric U, Gao A, Diamandis P. Tumour infiltrating lymphocytes are enriched in non-hypoxic glioblastoma niches. Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology. 2021 Jan 20; 80(2): 202-204.
42. Diamandis P. De-coding group 3 medulloblastoma biology with non-coding RNA. Neuro-Oncology. 2021; 23: 525-526.
43. Tizhoosh H, Diamandis P, Campbell CJV, Safarpour A, Kalra S, Maleki D, Riasatian A, Babaie M. Searching images for consensus: can AI remove observer variability in pathology? American Journal of Pathology. 2021 Oct; 191: 1702- 1708.
44. Riasatian A, Babaie M, Maleki D, Kalra S, Valipour M, Hemati S, Zaveri M, Safarpoor A, Shafiei S, Afshari M, Rasoolijaberi M, Sikaroudi M, Adnan M, Shah S, Choi C, Damaskinos S, Campbell CJ, Diamandis P, Pantanowitz L, Kashani H, Ghodsi A, Tizhoosh HR. Fine-Tuning and training of densenet for histopathology image representation using TCGA diagnostic slides. Medical Image Analysis. 2021 May; 70:102032.
45. Xia D, Leon A, Yan J, Silva A, Bakhtiari M, Tremblay-LeMay R, Selvarajah S, Sabatini P, Diamandis P, Pugh T, Kridel R, Delabie J. DNA Methylation-Based Classification of Small B-Cell Lymphomas: A Proof-of-Principle Study. Journal of Molecular Diagnostics. 2021 Dec; 23(12): 1774-1786.
46. Dehkharghanian T, Rahnamayan S, Riasatian A, Bidgoli A, Kalra S, Zaveri M, Babaie M, Sajadi M, Gonzalelz R, Diamandis P, Pantanowitz L, Huang T, Tizhoosh HR. Selection, Visualization, and Interpretation of Deep Features in Lung Adenocarcinoma and Squamous Cell Carcinoma. American Journal of Pathology. 2021 Sept; 191: 2172 –2183.
47. Melliou S, Sangster K, Djuric U, Diamandis P. The promise of organoids for unraveling the proteomic landscape of the developing human brain. Molecular Psychiatry. 2022 Jan; 27(1): 73-80.
48. Paff M, Samuel N, Alsafwani N, Paul D, Diamandis P, Climans SA, Kucharczyk W, Ding M, Gao A, Lozano A. Leukoencephalopathy with brain calcifications and cysts (Labrune syndrome) case report: diagnosis and management of a rare neurological disease. BMC Neurology. 2022 Jan 5; 22(1): 10.
49. Faust K, Lee M, Dent A, Fiala C, Portante A, Alsafwani N, Gao A, Djuric U, Diamandis P. (2021). Integrating morphologic and molecular histopathological features through whole slide image registration and deep learning. Neuro-Oncology Advances. 2022 Jan 5; 4(1): vdac001. 
50. Lam KHB, Leon AJ, Hui W, Lee SC, Batruch I, Faust K, Klekner A, Hutoczki G, Koritzinsky, Richer M, Djuric U, Diamandis P. Topographic mapping of the glioblastoma proteome reveals a triple axis model of intra-tumoral heterogeneity. Nature Communications. 2022 Jan 10; 13(1): 116.
51. Valkanas K, Diamandis P. Pareto distribution in virtual education: challenges and opportunity. Canadian Medical Education Journal. 2022 Mar 2: 13(1): 102-104.
52. Lee M, Rabindranath M, Faust K, Yao J, Gershon A, Alsafwani N, Diamandis P. Compound computer vision workflow for efficient and automated immunohistochemical analysis of whole slide images. 2022. Journal of Clinical Pathology. EPUB.
53. Melliou S, Sangster KT, Kao J, Zarrei M, Lam KHB, Howe J, Papaioannou MD, Tsang QPL, Borhani OA, Sajid RS, Bonnet C, Leheup B, Shannon P, Scherer SW, Stavropoulos DJ, Djuric U, Diamandis P. Regionally defined proteomic profiles of human cerebral tissue and organoids reveal conserved molecular modules of neurodevelopment. Cell Reports. 2022 May 24; 39(8): 110846.
54. Dent A, Diamandis P. Integrating computational pathology and proteomics to address tumor heterogeneity. 2022. Journal of Pathology. 2022 Jul; 257(4): 445-453.
55. Lam KHB, Faust K, Yin R, Fiala C, Diamandis P. The Brain Protein Atlas: a conglomerate of proteomics datasets of human neural tissue. Proteomics. Accepted August 2022.