The newly established Berkeley Genome Center, led by members of the Life Sciences Division in the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), is one of seven Cancer Genome Characterization Centers to receive awards from the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute. Earlier today the two institutes, both part of the National Institutes of Health, announced a three-year, $35-million project that will seek to identify important genetic changes involved in lung, brain, and ovarian cancers through genome analysis.
The Berkeley Cancer Genome Center is a collaboration among LBNL, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of California at San Francisco. The center's director is Joe W. Gray, who is the director of the Life Sciences Division and LBNL's Associate Laboratory Director for Life and Environmental Sciences.
Computational biologist Paul Spellman of the Life Sciences Division is codirector.
"The Berkeley Cancer Genome Center will be focused on identifying changes to the populations of messenger RNA that occur in cancer," said Spellman. Such changes are indicative of different kinds of proteins produced by the altered genomes of tumor cells.
More info: Paul Press, 510-486-6249, paul_press@lbl.gov
