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Cancer is a class of diseases characterized by dysfunctional behavior
of the cell's regulatory network. Cancer cells are abnormal cells that
avoid apoptosis and divide and proliferate in an uncontroled manner.
This misregulated growth is caused by damaged DNA and a series of mutations
that transform a normal cell into a malignant one.
While most of the lab's research focuses on basic science questions, these
can potentially shed insight into cancer. Understanding on how a
cell processes signals can help understand how and why
cancer cells uncontrolable proliferate. Understanding how sequence variation
alters the regulatory network and how a sequence
of such alterations manifest in fitness and new phenotypes
can help shed light on how cancer progresses and invades into other tissues.
We will take the tools and models developed in the other research areas in our lab
and apply these to cancer biology. We focus on two key directions:
- The NIH has launched a Cancer
Atlas project , a comprehensive and coordinated effort to sequence and profile
the expression of thousands of tumor samples. Our lab will use the methods we develop
to analyze the information flow from sequence variation, through gene expresion to
phenotype to analyze this data to find commonalities and points for potential treatment
from this data.
- In continuation of our collaboration with the
Nolan lab to build a landscape map
of normal cell signaling across different cell types and stimuli, we will use to Nolan
lab's ability to interogate primary cells, to derive patient specific signaling maps.
These will be compared to the landscape data to derive a patient specific signature for
that cancer. The Nolan lab has had
previous success in correlating these patient specific signatures with clinical outcome.
Our current efforts aim to gain a more global and causitive understanding of the links between
the cancer signatures and their associated clinical outcome.
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