Recent Scientific Progress and Achievements:
Genetics and Biology of Cancer Progression
Accomplishments include:
- Development by Drs. Albertson, Gray, Hodgson (Neurologic Oncology Program), Waldman and Pinkel (Cancer Genetics Program) of several aspects of BAC arrays CGH (Jain et al. 12; 325-32, 2002; Hamilton et al. 34; e58, 2006) and transfer of this important technology to the Cancer Center microarray core.
- Assessment by Drs. Colin Collins (Cancer Genetics Program, Prostate Cancer Program) and Gray of copy number abnormalities and structural aberrations at high resolution in cell lines and solid tumors using end sequence profiling (Volik et al. 16; 394-404, 2006).
- Development by Dr. Jain of Quantitative Pathway Analysis in Cancer for analysis of biological data in the context of pathways (Novak and Jain 22; 233-41, 2006).
- Assessment by Drs. Albertson, Esserman, Gray, Jain, Ljung, Pinkel (Cancer Genetics Program), McCormick Waldman of genome copy number and gene expression analyses of over 200 breast tumor samples and cell lines and identification of associations with outcome and other biological endpoints (Chin et al. 10; 529-41, 2006; Fridlyand et al. 6; 96, 2006; Neve et al. 10; 515-27, 2006).
- Illustration by by Dr. Goga and colleagues that of the roles of miRNAs in the regulation of ERBB2 and ERBB3 (Scott et al. 282; 1479-86, 2007).
- Analysis of the structural difference between estradiol and fulvestrant binding to ER (Padron et al. 21; 49-61, 2007).
- Demonstration by Dr. Keith Mostov and colleagues that PTEN localizes to the apical plasma membrane during epithelial morphogenesis and mediates the enrichment of PtdIns(4,5)P2 at this domain during cyst development in three-dimensional culture (Martin-Belmonte et al. 128; 383-97, 2007).
Future Plans: The recently funded Berkeley Cancer Genome Center (BCGC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratpry will provide a powerful suite of genome and transcriptome analysis technologies that will be applied to provide a comprehensive assessment of genomic events in breast cancer. In addition, a LBNL multi-scale image analysis program will be developed to allow high throughput assessment of the structure and function of cancer-specific variant proteins that are revealed by application of genome scale discovery programs.
