| Friday Lecture Series |
| Type | Friday Lecture Series |
| Title | Metabolic Inputs into Cancer Epigenetics |
| Subtitle | Philip Levine Memorial Lecture |
| Date | Friday, February 25, 2011 |
| Time | 3:45 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. (Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Reception Hall) |
| Location | Caspary Auditorium |
| Speaker(s) | Craig Thompson, M.D., president and chief executive officer, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center |
| Speaker Bio | Dr. Thompson and his colleagues study the connections between metabolism and the regulation of epigenetic remodeling of chromatin. Altered DNA methylation has been established as a hallmark of acute leukemia and yet very little is known concerning the mechanisms through which this occurs. Last year, in collaboration with others, Dr. Thompson's group found that neomorphic mutations of the citrate metabolism genes IDH1 and IDH2 induce DNA hypermethylation and impair differentiation in hematopoietic cells. IDH mutations create a block to DNA and histone demethylation as a result of the production of 2-hydroxyglutarate (2HG). 2HG acts as a competitive inhibitor of alpha-ketoglutarate-dependent enzymes. The epigenetic effects of 2HG are caused in part though inhibition of TET2, a DNA demethylase enzyme also mutated in leukemia. IDH 1/2- and TET2-mutant primary AML cells displayed a similar defect in epigenetic programming consisting of global hypermethylation and a gene-specific methylation signature. This work identifies IDH1/2- and TET2-mutant leukemias as a biologically distinct disease subtype, and links cancer metabolism with epigenetic control of gene expression. Dr. Thompson will discuss the implications of this work and the identification of additional metabolic genes involved in epigenetic deregulation of cancer will be discussed. Dr. Thompson attended Dartmouth College and completed his studies at Dartmouth Medical School. He received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977 and completed his residency at Harvard's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in 1979. Following his residency, he spent two years as a senior resident at Boston University while serving as a medical officer in the U.S. Navy assigned to the Naval Blood Research Laboratory. He spent a total of eight years as a Navy medical officer, including two years at the Naval Blood Research Institute, three years at the National Naval Center/Naval Medical Research Institute, and three years as a clinical research associate at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute, in Seattle, Washington. In 1987, Dr. Thompson joined the University of Michigan's department of medicine. And in 1993, he was recruited by University of Chicago as the first director of the Gwen Knapp Center for Lupus and Immunology Research and professor in the departments of medicine and molecular genetics and cell biology. In addition, from 1989 through 1993, Dr. Thompson was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) associate investigator, and an HHMI investigator from 1993 to 1999. Dr. Thompson is a board-certified internist and medical oncologist, and has extensive research experience in cancer, immunology, and translational medicine. In 2003, he was elected to the Institute of Medicine and in 2005 was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He currently serves as chair of the HHMI Medical Advisory Board. He is also a member of the board of directors of the Association of American Cancer Institutes and the American Association for Cancer Research, and is a member of the Lasker Prize Jury. Dr. Thompson has been a member of the advisory boards of several cancer centers including St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. |
| Open To | Public |
| Phone | 212-327-8072 |
| Readings | http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=1997 |
