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Among the Most Deadly

In 2012, Congress passed the Recalcitrant Cancer Research Act to draw attention to the deadliest cancers that afflict our society, those for which the odds of surviving for five years after diagnosis is less than 50 percent. Among the worst of the worst, pancreatic cancer—or, more specifically, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC)—presents a five-year survival rate of less than five percent. With no early-detection markers, the disease is usually discovered at an advanced stage and once discovered, the response to chemotherapy is poor. Within CCR, diverse multidisciplinary efforts to understand and treat PDAC are gaining momentum. Read more about the deadliest cancers »

Bacterial Regulation: Past, Present, and Future

Many scientists are lucky to have one fundamental insight to their name. As recently noted by the National Academy of Sciences when they awarded her the 2015 Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology, Susan Gottesman, Ph.D., Co-Chief of CCR’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology, has made at least two seminal discoveries about post-transcriptional regulation in bacterial cells: 1) she uncovered the critical role of protein breakdown and the energy-dependent proteases that govern this process, and 2) she co-discovered small RNAs and established their role in bacterial cell regulation. Each of these discoveries has presaged their more complex counterparts in eukaryotic cells. Gottesman continues to study molecular regulation in bacteria both for the general principles to be learned and for their particular applications to host infection and immunity. Read more about bacterial regulation »