Center for Cancer Research

The Center for Cancer Research Seminar Series occurs weekly and provides an opportunity for the MGH research community to learn from national & international leaders in cancer research.

NK cells are known for their innate ability to kill cancer and virus-infected cells. However, they fail to kill their targets in solid organs. In a MAR 2022 paper published in Science Advances, Bunting, et al. provide a novel explanation for this fundamental dilemma in the field of NK cell biology.

Raul Mostoslavsky, MD, PhD and colleagues at MGH and Harvard have developed a highly sensitive method for visualizing DNA repair mechanisms at work.

In a June 2021 Science Advances paper, Li et al. describe a distinct consequence of exposure to carcinogen that can have significant immunologic implications: the nongenetic induction of a chemokine called CCL21 in breast cancer cells that developed following an exposure to a chemical carcinogen.

Congratulations to Lee Zou, PhD and Raul Mostoslavsky, MD, PhD who will serve as Scientific co-Directors of the Mass General Cancer Center and Center for Cancer Research.

A team at Mass General has devised a new ultrahigh-throughput microfluidic chip (the LPCTC-iCHIP) that improves sensitivity of CTC-based assays 100-fold as compared to existing approaches. The team’s paper appeared recently in the May 2020 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cancer researchers have identified changes in lung cancer-promoting genes that may allow the disease to metastasize to the brain. Their work, which points to possible therapies for preventing or treating brain metastases from lung cancer, is described in the March 2020 issue of Nature Genetics.