This week's Hudson seminar
will be held in Seminar Rooms 1 & 2,
Level 2, TRF Building on Thursday 17th May, 12pm-1pm.
Our speaker will be Professor Andreas Strasser PhD
Joint Division Head, Molecular Genetics of Cancer, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research.
Joint Division Head, Molecular Genetics of Cancer, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research.
He will be presenting 'How does the tumour suppressor, p53, protect us from cancer?'
Dr. Strasser is the head of the Molecular Genetics of Cancer
Division at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) in Melbourne, Australia.
He completed his Master of Science and Ph.D. at the Basel Institute for
Immunology and University of Basel in Switzerland before joining WEHI as a
postdoctoral fellow in 1989. He studies programmed cell death and how defects
in apoptosis cause cancer or autoimmune disease and impair the response of
tumor cells to anti-cancer therapy. Dr. Strasser and his colleagues were the
first to discover that abnormalities in cell death can cause cancer and
autoimmune disease, including the discovery that BCL-2 collaborates with the
MYC oncogene in tumorigenesis. Their studies have determined which pro-survival
BCL-2 family member are essential for the sustained growth of which cancers.
They also found that BCL-2 and death receptors regulate distinct pathways to
apoptosis and have studied how the individual and overlapping roles of these
two apoptotic pathways function in the immune system. Dr. Strasser discovered
BIM and BMF, and was the first to show that BH3-only proteins are essential for
the initiation of programmed cell death and stress-induced apoptosis. Based on this
work, a collaboration between WEHI (including the Strasser group), Genentech,
and AbbVie led to the development of the BCL-2 inhibitor Venetoclax/ABT-199,
which is approved for treatment of refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia,
while a similar collaboration with Servier yielded the first potent and
selective inhibitor of the cell death inhibitor MCL-1, currently in clinical
trials.
No comments:
Post a Comment