Global Inequalities implications for research, practice and policy

Michael Marmot was born in London, England. He moved to Australia as a young child and graduated in Medicine from the University of Sydney, Australia, in 1968. He earned a MPH in 1972 and PhD in 1975 from the University of California, Berkeley. He became Fellow of the (English) Faculty of Public Health Medicine in 1989 and was appointed Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at UCL in 1985. This became a joint Chair, held at UCL and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in 1990. He became Director of the International Centre for Health and Society (now the International Institute for Society and Health) that he established at UCL in 1994. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and awarded an MRC Professorship in 1995. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1996. In 2004 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Epidemiology. He was Chair of the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health from 2005 to 2008.

Skin Cancer Prevention and Early Detection

Skin cancers -- including basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma -- are on the rise, but using sunscreen liberally and limiting exposure to the sun can help prevent them, says Isaac Brownell of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Regular self-examination of your skin, including a yearly dermatology checkup, is the best way to identify skin lesions that may be cancerous. Diagnostic tools such as dermoscopy and confocal microscopy provide detailed images of skin lesions, which may help detect skin cancers and avoid unnecessary biopsies of non-cancerous lesions.

Molecular Assays for Colorectal Cancer Care

Molecular assays for risk stratification for cancer and for the early detection of cancer are currently being developed and are beginning to be used in clinical care. Likewise, molecular assays are being developed as predictive and prognostic markers for cancer. The state-of-the art of currently available risk stratification assays and molecular screening assays for colorectal cancer will be discussed. Current developments in the generation of predictive and prognostic markers for colorectal cancer will also be discussed. Finally, future directions for molecular assays for colorectal cancer will be reviewed.

Functionalizing the Cancer Genome

Using Dendritic Cells to Create Cancer Vaccines

Edgar Engleman, MD, medical director of the Stanford Blood Center, discusses his research involving the use of a special type of white blood cell as a treatment for cancer. Engleman, who is also a professor of pathology at the Stanford School of Medicine, and his team of researchers have been interested in dendritic cells, or DCs, which can provoke an immune response in the body

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.