Research Highlights advisory panel
Research Highlights advisory panel
Papers and web sites in the Research Highlights section of Nature Reviews Cancer are chosen with the aid of the following advisors:
- Avi Ashkenazi
- José Baselga
- Anton Berns
- Maria Blasco
- Ron Depinho
- Glenn Dranoff
- Rakesh Jain
- Christoph Lengauer
- Lance Liotta
- John D. Potter
- David Sidransky
- Bert Vogelstein
- Robert A Weinberg
- Zena Werb
Avi Ashkenazi
Avi Ashkenazi received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1986 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He did his postdoctoral research in the Department of Hormone Research at the University of California, San Francisco,USA, and in the Department of Molecular Biology at Genentech, Inc., where he studied the molecular biology and biochemistry of novel muscarinic acetylcholine receptors. In 1989, he became a scientist at Genentech. Since 1999, he has been a staff scientist in Genentech's department of Molecular Oncology. His group has discovered several new members of the tumour-necrosis-factor ligand and receptor families. At present, they are investigating the biological roles of these proteins in the control of apoptosis and immunity.
José Baselga
José Baselga is the Chief of Medical Oncology Service and Director of Medical Oncology, Haematology, and Radiation Oncology at the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, Spain. He is also Professor of Medicine at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona and the Scientific Chairman of the Spanish breast cancer cooperative group SOLTI. His research interests are in the area of growth factor receptors and downstream molecules as targets for cancer therapy and he has been involved in the clinical development of several new agents including trastuzumab, IMC-C225, and ZD1839, RAS inhibitors and antiangiogenic agents.
Anton Berns
Anton Berns is Director of Research at The Netherlands Cancer Institute, and Professor of Experimental Molecular Genetics at the University of Amsterdam. Having received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Rudolf Jaenisch at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, and subsequently focused on the identification and characterization of collaborating oncogenes in mice using retroviral insertional mutagenesis as a tool. In 1985, he moved to The Netherlands Cancer Institute, where he has made a major effort to develop conditional transgenic and knockout mouse models for cancer. Defining the contribution of individual oncogenic mutations to the phenotypic characteristics of cancers is an important focus of his work.
Maria Blasco
Maria Blasco joined Carol Greider's laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor in New York, USA, in 1993 to investigate telomeres and telomerase. At that time, the molecular entities that are responsible for telomerase activity had not been identified in mammals. Her research focused on the identification of the telomerase RNA component and she also generated the first telomerase-knockout mouse, which has been an essential tool for understanding the role of telomerase and telomeres in cancer and ageing. In 1997, she started her own research group in Madrid, in the Department of Immunology and Oncology of the National Center of Biotechnology. She moved to the Spanish National Cancer Centre (CNIO) in 2003, where she is the head of the Molecular Oncology programme. During this time, she has continued to develop and characterize new mouse models for telomere research. She was elected EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) Member in the year 2000. That same year, she received the Swiss Bridge Award 2000 for Research in Cancer and the FEBS (Federation of European Biochemical Societies) Anniversary Award. In 2002, Maria received the EACR (European Association for Cancer Research) and ELSO (European Life Scientist Organization) Young Investigator Awards. In 2003, she was awarded the Josef Steiner Cancer Research Award.
Ron Depinho
Ron DePinho is the American Cancer Society Research Professor and Professor of Medicine and Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. Before he joined the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard, Ron DePinho was a Professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. His research has focused on key genetic events in the life-history of cancer cells, including those that impact on cell-cycle control (the INK4A-RB pathway), cellular survival (ARF-p53 pathway), cellular crisis (telomeres and telomerase) and host-tumour interactions. He pioneered the concept of tumour maintenance and the role of cellular crisis in cancer. His programme makes extensive use of engineered mouse models of human cancer to understand complex interactions between cancer-relevance pathways on the organismal level.
Glenn Dranoff
Glenn Dranoff is Associate Professor of Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, USA. He received a medical degree from Duke University and completed an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He did his fellowship in Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Glenn obtained postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute. His research interests include cancer vaccines and cytokine function.
Rakesh Jain
Rakesh K. Jain is the Andrew Werk Cook Professor of Tumor Biology in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School, the Director of the Edwin L. Steele Laboratory of Tumor Biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and an affiliated faculty member in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Rakesh received his bachelor's degree in 1972 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1974 and 1976 from the University of Delaware, USA, all in chemical engineering. He is considered to be a pioneer in the fields of tumour pathophysiology and bioengineering. Rakesh has developed an impressive array of imaging technologies, and sophisticated animal and mathematical models that provide unprecedented molecular, cellular, anatomical and functional insight into the inner workings of solid tumours and the role of host-tumour interactions. He has also translated this insight into improved strategies for cancer detection and treatment. His contributions have been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship (1983-1984), Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (1990-1991), Whitaker Award of the Biomedical Engineering Society (1995), Eugene Landis Award of the Microcirculation Society (1996), Outstanding Investigator Grant of the National Cancer Institute (1993-2000) and membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (2003).
Christoph Lengauer
Christoph Lengauer studied biology at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He worked at Heidelberg and Vienna and is now Assistant Professor of Oncology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, USA. Christopher's research is devoted to solving the mystery of aneuploidy in cancers and the discovery of new cancer drugs.
Lance Liotta
Lance A. Liotta is Chief of the Laboratory of Pathology and Chief of the Section of Tumour Invasion and Metastases at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA. He received his M.D./ Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University in 1976. His lifelong career focus has been cancer invasion and metastasis, and he was one of the first scientists to investigate this process at a molecular level. He showed the link between angiogenesis onset, tumour invasion and metastatic dissemination, and proposed that interactions between tumour cells and the extracellular matrix are crucial to invasion and metastasis. He has discovered many molecules that modulate tumour cell invasion, providing new strategies for diagnosis and intervention. He invented laser capture microdissection, which he is using to profile signalling pathways that are deranged in the tissue microenvironment during the transition from premalignant to invasive cancer.
John D. Potter
John D. Potter, M.D., Ph.D., is Member and Director of the Division of Public Health Sciences of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre, and a professor of Epidemiology at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. His research interests include the aetiology and prevention of colon cancer, gene-environment interactions in cancer, and the mechanisms whereby plant foods lower risk of cancer. John is principal investigator of the Seattle Familial Colorectal Registry, one of six sites in an international consortium that is focussed on the causes of familial colorectal cancer and on developing effective means of prevention and mortality reduction. Other projects include investigations into the mechanisms of oxidative damage and changes in expression of apoptosis-related proteins in patients with colorectal and pancreatic cancer. The ultimate goals of these studies are to increase our understanding of cancer causation, develop new screening techniques and to develop or improve prevention methods.
David Sidransky
David Sidransky received his M.D. in 1984 from Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, USA. In 1988, he pursued a Clinical Oncology fellowship at Johns Hopkins University and completed a research fellowship under Bert Vogelstein. During this time, he discovered that RAS gene mutations could be identified in the stools of patients with colorectal cancer, opening up an entirely new approach to the molecular genetic diagnosis of human cancer. He joined the Hopkins faculty in 1992 and was promoted to his current position - as Professor of Otolaryngology, Oncology, Pathology, Urology and Cellular and Molecular Medicine - in 1998. His work focuses on molecular detection approaches based on the identification of clonal genetic changes in bodily fluids such as urine, saliva, stools and blood.
Bert Vogelstein
Bert Vogelstein and his colleagues have shown that colorectal tumours result from the gradual accumulation of genetic alterations in specific oncogenes and tumour-suppressor genes. They have shown that naturally occurring mutations in genes such as TP53 and APC can provide critical clues to their biochemical and physiological functions. This work has had substantial implications for diagnosis and treatment and has formed a model for understanding human tumorigenesis in general. Their current studies are devoted to further understanding the genes and pathways through which colorectal neoplasia develops, as well as to the translation of this knowledge to patient management.
Robert Weinberg
Robert Weinberg's laboratory is interested in the contribution of oncogenes, tumour-suppressor genes and telomerase to the cell transformation process. In 1982, his laboratory discovered a point mutation in RAS, which represented the first somatic mutation documented in a human tumour-cell genome. In 1986, workers in his laboratory isolated the retinoblastoma tumour-suppressor gene, RB. More recently, the Weinberg laboratory has isolated TERT, the gene encoding the catalytic subunit of human telomerase, and this has allowed them to transform normal human cells into tumour cells. At present, the laboratory is focusing on understanding the interactions between cancer cells and normal cells that have been recruited into the tumour mass and that help transformed tumour cells to proliferate.
Zena Werb
Zena Werb is Professor and Vice-Chair of Anatomy and a member of the Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Program in Biological Sciences and the Biomedical Science Program at the University of California, San Francisco. She received her B.Sc. (honours) in Biochemistry from the University of Toronto, her Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the Rockefeller University and was a Medical Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow at Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge, United Kingdom. She joined the faculty of the University of California as an assistant professor in 1976, became an associate professor in 1980 and a professor in 1983. Zena Werb's laboratory is interested in how proteinases regulate the cellular microenvironment, focusing on the cellular and organismal regulation and functions of MMPs and their inhibitors.