NIH Director’s Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series

Senescence: live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse

In addition to serving as director of NCI, Dr. Sharpless continues his research in understanding the biology of the aging process that promotes the conversion of normal self-renewing cells into dysfunctional cancer cells. Dr. Sharpless has made seminal contributions to the understanding of the relationship between aging and cancer, and in the preclinical development of novel therapeutics for melanoma, lung cancer, and breast cancer.

Can you catch dementia? Insights and solutions from prion disease

Professor Collinge leads a highly multidisciplinary research unit dedicated to understanding prion diseases. Prions are notorious “protein-only” infectious agents devoid of genes which cause invariably fatal brain diseases following silent incubation periods which may span a human lifetime. The diseases can arise spontaneously, by infection or be inherited. Remarkably, prions are composed of a cloud of self-propagating assemblies of a misfolded cellular protein that can encode information, generate neurotoxicity and evolve and adapt in vivo.

Of mice and men: what we can learn about human cancer by studying mouse models

The research in Cory Abate-Shen’s laboratory is focused on understanding basic mechanisms of transcriptional regulation and differentiation, and how these become dysregulated in cancer. The laboratory takes a multi-disciplinary approach to investigate genitourinary malignancies, which includes using mechanism-based studies, analyses of genetically-engineered mouse models (GEMMs), and state-of-the-art systems biology approaches.