Cancer Center Director: Richard P . Woychik, Ph.D. 600 Main Street Bar Harbor, ME 04609-0800 Tel: (207) 288-6041 Fax: (207) 288-6044 Visit Website

Science at The Jackson Laboratory Cancer Center gains its strength and focus from multidisciplinary approaches to cancer, grounded in the genomics and basic biology of the mouse. Accurate preclinical models for human cancers are a foundation for translational research, a proving ground for target identification and validation. Among the best are modern mouse models, in which sophisticated genetic manipulation in the context of defined genetic backgrounds reproduces molecular aberrations associated with human tumors. Equally valuable are xenochimeras for trials of transplantation and regenerative medicine. The construction of these models is informed both by clinical research that identifies critical features of human cancers and by the biology and genetics of the mouse. The Jackson Laboratory Cancer Center has a single research program, Modeling cancer: stem cells to therapy. Several members work on stem/progenitor cells, focusing on aspects of genome organization, nuclear architecture, and nuclear reprogramming, genome instability and programmed cell death in normal and transitional cells. Others investigate mechanisms involved in disease progression and host response, such as angiogenesis, immune recognition, metabolic regulators, and processes of aging. Prevention and therapy research involves targeting signal transduction pathways; bone marrow transplantation; and complications of cancer and therapy that become health issues for survivors, such as bone loss, reproductive failure and anemia. The sophisticated scientific services and resources supported by the Cancer Center enable this research..

All of the research draws on the mouse genetic resources and information about them, including the panoply of induced and spontaneous mutations and the increasingly well-understood genomes of the inbred strains housed here. In turn, all of the research done at the Cancer Center enhances those resources, both for our own investigators and for the wider scientific community. Cancer Center members are participating in international efforts to create comprehensive knowledge bases of well-annotated genomic and phenomic data. These resources support both wet-bench genetic analyses and computational methods for identifying polymorphisms associated with susceptibility to various cancers. They also support data-mining to uncover associations between cancer susceptibility, phenotypic risk factors, and genetic variation.