Beckman Symposium 2004 - Cancer
Distinguished Speakers Discuss the Battle for a Cure
April 30, 2004 | Fairchild Auditorium
A.M.
| 7:00 | Breakfast in Fairchild Auditorium lobby and breakout session with Brian Druker | |
| 8:00 | Lucy Shapiro | Welcome and Opening Remarks |
| 8:10 | Brian Druker | lmatinib as a Paradigm of Molecularly Targeted Therapies |
| 8:50 | Patrick Brown | Ways to Look at Molecular Portraits of Cancer |
| 9:30 | Midmorning breakout session with Patrick Brown | |
| 10:10 | Napoleone Ferrara | VEGF: Basic Science and Clinical Progress |
| 10:50 | Elaine Fuchs | Stem Cells of the Skin and Their Lineages |
| 11:40 | Lunchtime breakout session with Napoleone Ferrara and Elaine Fuchs |
P.M.
| 1:00 | Stanton Glantz | Politics: Cancer Cause or Cancer Cure? |
| 1:40 | Lee Hartwell | Prospects for Improving Cancer Survival |
| 2:20 | Afternoon breakout session with Stanton Glantz and Lee Hartwell | |
| 3:00 | Vicki Lundblad | Replicating and Protecting Chromosome Ends |
| 3:40 | Nikola Pavletich | Structure and Function of the BRCA2 Tumor Suppressor |
| 4:20 | Ronald Levy | Closing Remarks |
| 4:30 | Breakout session with Vicki Lundblad and Nikola Pavletich | |
| 4:30 | Reception in Fairchild Auditorium lobby |
Speaker Profiles
PATRICK BROWN is Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Stanford University. Reaping the harvest of the human genome project, he pioneered the development of DNA microarrays to measure and analyze the gene expression program of the cell. His work has opened new frontiers for understanding cancer and other human diseases, providing hope that microarray technology will revolutionize the practice of medicine.
BRIAN DRUKER is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and JELD-WEN Chair of Leukemia Research at Oregon Health and Science University Cancer Institute. His groundbreaking work on the development of the drug Gleevec has transformed cancer treatment. As the first of a new class of molecularly targeted drugs approved by the FDA, Gleevec holds enormous promise for comparable drugs to treat a broad range of cancers.
NAPOLEONE FERRARA is a molecular oncologist who joined Genentech from the University of California, San Francisco. He identified the gene for human vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) protein and characterized its role in tumor angiogenesis, leading to development of an antibody treatment for cancer. His latest research involving endocrine gland VEGF may likewise have therapeutic implications for not only cancer, but also macular degeneration, heart disease, and wound healing.
ELAINE FUCHS is the Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Rockefeller University. Her important research focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying development and differentiation of mammalian skin. Utilizing mammalian stem cell cultures and gene-knockout technology as model systems, her work reveals how these processes malfunction in various human disorders of the skin including genetic diseases and cancer.
STANTON GLANTZ is Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at University of California, San Francisco. His achievements include defense of the San Francisco Workplace Smoking Ordinance, identification of involuntary smoke as a cause of heart disease, and demonstration that the tobacco industry was aware of the harmful effects of smoking since the mid-1960s. He currently leads a campaign to end smoking in youth-related movies.
LEE HARTWELL is President and Director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Professor in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle. His pioneering work in yeast genetics provided the foundation for understanding how normal cells divide and how disorders in this process lead to cancer. His contributions to the field have been recognized by the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
VICKI LUNDBLAD is Professor in the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine. Her innovative research uses the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to study telomere biology. Because many features of telomere function are shared by yeast and humans, her work sheds light on how telomeres are replicated and maintained in human cells and how telomere function plays a role in carcinogenesis and aging.
NIKOLA PAVLETICH is Chair of the Structural Biology Program and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. His laboratory uses three-dimensional X-ray crystallography together with biochemical and cellular biological data to understand the function of key proteins that are altered in cancer cells. He seeks to determine how their mutation contributes to tumorigenesis and how they can be targeted by novel chemotherapeutic compounds.
From Stanford
Beckman Center Director LUCY SHAPIRO is the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research in the Department of Developmental Biology at Stanford University. She is a microbial geneticist whose innovative use of the bacterium Caulobacter crescentus has yielded fundamental insights for understanding the bacterial cell as a paradigm for an integrated system in which the transcriptional circuitry is interwoven with the three-dimensional deployment of key regulatory and morphological proteins.
Beckman 2004 Symposium Co-Chair GILBERT CHU is Professor in the Departments of Medicine (Oncology) and Biochemistry at Stanford University. He studies how human cells respond to DNA damage. He is defining pathways for repairing bulky adducts and double-strand breaks and for generating immunological diversity. His lab has also developed new methods for analyzing microarray data and used the methods to identify cancer patients at risk for toxicity from radiation therapy.
Beckman 2004 Symposium Co-Chair ROELAND NUSSE is Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Stanford University. He studies how cells communicate during development. His work on Wnt signaling has led to the first purification of active Wnt proteins and insight into the control of stem cell growth with implications for developmental biology and tissue regeneration. Purified Wnt proteins hold great promise as a key reagent for tissue engineering.
RONALD LEVY is the Robert K. and Helen K. Summy Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Oncology at Stanford University. Noted for treating cancer with monoclonal antibodies in the 1980s, Dr. Levy’s current research concentrates on the study of malignant lymphoma and tumors of the immune system. His lab employs the tools of immunology and molecular biology to develop a better understanding of the initiation and progression of the malignant process in B cell and T cell tumors.