Cell Biology: How Do Cells Make Decisions?

The moderator is Marc Kirschner, PhD, John Franklin Enders University Professor of Systems Biology, Department of Systems Biology, Harvard University; the speaker is Richard Losick, PhD, Maria Moors Cabot Professor of Biology, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University; and panelists are Hana El Samad, assistant professor, Biochemistry & Biophysics, UC Berkeley/UCSF Graduate Group in Bioengineering; and Jonathan Weissman, PhD, professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology and of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF.

Research Mechanics: Putting the Brakes on Cancer

In this Howard Hughes Medical Institute program, Bert Vogelstein, professor of oncology and pathology at Johns Hopkins University, explains that although there are numerous kinds of cancer, all stem from alterations that allow cell division to outstrip cell demise. Cancers are caused by an accumulation of mutations that alter the activity of genes involved in controlling cell birth, growth, and death. Some of these errors are inherited, but most occur after birth, triggered by environmental carcinogens or by mistakes during cell division. If cancer is likened to a car speeding out of control, cancer-causing mutations are like broken brakes, a stuck accelerator, or an inept mechanic.

Cancer: How Do We Prevent Metastasis?

In this lecture, titled "Cancer: How Do We Prevent Metastasis?," the moderator is Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, MD, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; the speaker is Joan Massagué, PhD, chair of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program in the Sloan-Kettering Institute; and panelists are Zena Werb, PhD, professor and vice chair, Department of Anatomy at UCSF, and Marc Shuman, MD, professor of medicine and of urology, and Cancer Research Institute at UCSF.

Getting in and out of Mitosis

Prof. Tim Hunt was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Leland H. Hartwell and Sir Paul Nurse "for their discoveries of key regulators of the cell cycle." He finished his PhD in 1968. He  discovered that tiny amounts of glutathione inhibited protein synthesis in reticulocytes, and that tiny amounts of RNA killed the synthesis all together. After returning to Cambridge he work with Hunter and Richard Jackson, who had discovered the RNA strand used to start haemoglobin synthesis. After 3–4 years the team discovered at least two other chemicals acting as inhibitors.While doing summer work in 1982 at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, using the sea urchin (Arbacia punctulata) egg as his model organism, he discovered the cyclin molecule. Hunt found that cyclins begin to be synthesised after the eggs are fertilized and increase in levels during interphase, until they drop very quickly in the middle of mitosis in each cell division. He also found that cyclins are present in vertebrate cells where they also regulate the cell cycle. He and others subsequently showed that the cyclins bind and activate a family of protein kinases, now called the cyclin-dependent kinases, one of which had been identified as a crucial cell cycle regulator by Paul Nurse.In 1990, he began work at Imperial Cancer Research Fund, now known as the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute in the United Kingdom. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1991 and a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1999. 

Emerging cancer therapies

Professor Christopher Parish of the John Curtin School of Medical Research at The Australian National University gives this public lecture discussing emerging cancer therapies. This Public Lecture was held in conjunction with The Bootes Course on Translational Medicine.

Professor Parish is head of The Cancer and Vascular Biology Group which has been working for a number of years on the molecular basis of cell adhesion, cell migration and cell invasion, with a particular emphasis on the immune system, tumour metastasis and the growth of new blood vessels (angiogenesis).

Of particular interest has been the role of anionic carbohydrates, such as heparan sulfate, in these processes and the enzyme, heparanase, that degrades heparan sulfate. More recent studies have led to mechanisms of epigenetic control of immune response genes.

In addition the Group aims to apply its basic research findings in cancer and immunology to (i) develop new drugs, notably heparan sulfate mimetics, which inhibit inflammation, cancer spread and angiogenesis and (ii) design clever vaccines for cancer immunotherapy.