Towards Precision Functional Genomics For Rare Tumors
With the comprehensive analysis of cancer genomes nearly complete, the research community stands poised to make major inroads in mapping and validating new tumor vulnerabilities and rapidly advancing therapeutic hypotheses into clinical settings. However, to fulfill the promise of precision cancer genomics, we must now determine the molecular consequences of many thousands of mutant genes in each cancer patient and determine how to kill tumors on the basis of these activities.
Our lab is focused on developing models and tools to accelerate the translation of cancer genomics into cancer therapeutics for individual cancer patients with rare tumors. Our work leverages long standing experience (together with collaborators) in building genetically defined transformation models of human cancer as platforms for oncogene discovery, new comprehensive collections of cancer-variant specific perturbation reagents and new approaches to systematically map cancer vulnerabilities linked with predictive biomarkers.
A NEw type of lab for a new type of science
Team science is revolutionizing biomedicine. Dream teams composed of scientists from multiple disciplines, labs, research groups and organizations must efficiently collaborate to solve the major scientific challenges of our time. Unfortunately, the lab structures and incentives that were built for the science of 1990 are fundamentally different than the structures that are needed in 2024. The science of 2024 requires teams composed of excellent individual scientists as well as individuals who can accelerate and engineer effective collaborations. The science of 2024 requires open-source projects whose goal it is to empower the world, rather than to empower one specific lab.
We are building enabling technologies to transform cancer functional genomics, engineering large interdisciplinary research efforts and running open source projects with the explicit goal of catalyzing the world's scientific community.
It's an experiment in building a new type of lab.