A team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Stanford University has identified a tumor-suppressor function for Chd5, a member of the chromatin remodeling protein (CHD) family that maps to the 1p36 region of human chromosome 1. Their results are published February 9 in Cell.

Mutations in 1p36 are coincident with many diseases, including neural cancers, melanoma, hematopoietic cancers, and epithelial cancers of the thyroid, cervix, colon, and breast. These mutations are usually deletions, sparking a widespread search for a tumor suppressor as the missing link.  Read more  

Mapping the Cancer Genome

The following captures some of the highlights from an article in the March 2007 Scientific American magazine that I wrote with National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) Director Dr. Francis Collins. It represents one of the first detailed discussions of The Cancer Genome Atlas in a publication that is widely read by a variety of audiences.

Writing in Science in 1986, Dr. Renato Dulbecco, a pioneering cancer researcher and Nobel Laureate declared, "We are at a turning point." Discoveries in preceding years had made clear that much of the deranged behavior of cancer cells stemmed from damage to their genes and alterations in their functioning. "We have two options," he wrote. "Either try to discover the genes important in malignancy by a piecemeal approach, or…sequence the whole genome."  Read more  

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