Date Posted
Speaker
James DeGregori, Ph.D.
Courtenay C. and Lucy Patten Davis Endowed Chair in Lung Cancer Research
Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
School of Medicine
Aurora, CO
James DeGregori is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics (faculty since 1997) and Deputy Director of the University of Colorado Cancer Center. He has degrees from the University of Texas at Austin (B.A. Microbiology) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D. Biology), and received postdoctoral training at Duke University. He holds the Courtenay and Lucy Patten Davis Endowed Chair in Lung Cancer Research, and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Aging And Cancer. His lab studies the evolution of cancer, in the context of their Adaptive Oncogenesis model, with a focus on how aging, smoking, Down Syndrome, and other insults influence cancer initiation and responses to therapy. In this model, mutations face fitness landscapes that vary with age, genetics, or following carcinogen exposure. These fitness landscapes are highly dependent on the state of the tissue microenvironment in which stem cells reside. The lab has developed this cancer model based on classic evolutionary principles, and substantiated this model by theoretical, experimental and computational studies. Additional studies in the lab seek to identify metabolic and signaling vulnerabilities in cancer, with a focus on acute myeloid leukemias, that can be exploited for the development of more effective therapies. For all of these studies, we leverage a variety of tools, including computational biology, genomics, metabolomics, cell biology, and biochemistry, leveraging both mouse models and human samples.
Point of Contact
Gabriela Riscuta, M.D., C.N.S.
Nutritional Science Research Group
NCI Division of Cancer Prevention
Email: gabriela.riscuta@nih.gov