Center for Cancer Research

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.

In a Feb 2020 paper published in Nature, CCR faculty members Gad Getz and Esther Rheinbay, together with their colleagues, studied the landscape of protein-coding and non-coding regulatory driver events in cancer.

In a February 2020 paper published in Molecular Cell, Matos and colleagues in the Zou laboratory reported that the ATR kinase is a key sensor of R loops and a suppressor of R loop-associated DNA damage.