Cancer Research at Berkeley

Berkeley’s strength in cancer research lies in the outstanding investigators already committed to this area. Basic cancer research at Berkeley is directed at describing the genetic changes that occur in cancer cells and the development of targeted therapies. Areas of active basic cancer research in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology include tumor cell biology; the use of model systems to discover novel genes involved in carcinogenesis; tumor immunology and immunotherapeutics; and structural biology of protein targets for cancer therapeutics.

Another strength of the Berkeley campus is that - like many medical schools, but unlike most undergraduate/graduate campuses - we have a department of Public Health with investigators working on cancer epidemiology and a Department of Nutrition and Toxicology with investigators working on the relationship between diet and cancer. The Department of Bioengineering contains faculty interested in the development of novel imaging and other technologies applicable to the cancer problems. Berkeley also has great strength in the basic sciences, with world-class Departments of Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, Chemistry, Engineering and Molecular and Cell Biology. These Departments provide an intellectual infrastructure for cancer research. For example, investigators in the Departments of Mathematics and of Statistics are interested in computational biology and the analysis of large datasets, fields that are very important for systems biology and cancer research.  Faculty in the Chemistry Department are working on many areas relevant to cancer research, such as structural biology, chemistry of macromolecules and combinatorial chemistry, a method that allows the generation of large numbers of novel drug candidates. The Physics Department includes biophysicists interested in, for example, single molecule analysis. These physical science departments represent important assets for cancer research that are lacking at most medical schools.

Another asset for cancer research at Berkeley is the presence of a state-funded Cancer Research Laboratory which provides core support for cancer research. This organized research unit provides advanced technical resources to cancer researchers in the areas of microscopy, flow cytometry, microarray analysis, proteomics, mass spectrometry, as well as gene targeting/transgenic mouse facility. The latter allows cancer researchers to generate novel mouse models of human cancers and mutant mice for physiological studies of a specific gene.

Finally, another asset for Berkeley is our relationship with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Life sciences Division (LSD). LBNL intends to set up a high throughput screening facility for use by both academic and industrial investigators. Possible collaborations in the future include utilization of a high throughput strategy to sequence the human orthologs of these genes from a large panel of cancer cell lines. Identification of candidate genes will be driven by research that is currently being conducted in the labs of Berkeley campus investigators.  This will be followed by sequencing candidate genes from a collection of 500 human cancer cell lines that are derived from a wide variety of human cancers. This might greatly accelerate the rate of discovery of such genes and result in a dramatic improvement in our understanding of the pathogenesis of many types of cancer at the molecular level.

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