The public lecture will be presented by Ross Cagan:
"Flies and Cancer in the Era of Precision Medicine"
Thursday, June 2, 2016 at 18:00.
Professor Ross L. Cagan, Professor of Developmental and Regenerative Biology, Oncological Sciences and Ophthalmology; and Senior Associate Dean for the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York
Dr. Cagan received his PhD at Princeton University and is currently Director of the Center for Personalized Cancer Therapeutics, and Senior Editor of the journal Disease Models and Mechanisms. His laboratory has pioneered the use of Drosophila for novel approaches to cancer including lung, colorectal, and thyroid cancers. Taking advantage of a century of powerful genetic tools, his laboratory has developed complex fly disease platforms designed to model specific aspects of human disease. In addition to studying the mechanisms that direct cancer and diabetes, he and his colleagues has developed a novel robotics-based approach for screening whole animals for new therapeutic leads. This approach helped promote the first FDA-approved chemotherapeutic for Medullary Thyroid Carcinoma. More recently, his laboratory has focused on developing polypharmacological as well as personalized approaches to these complex diseases including the Center for Personalized Cancer Therapeutics, a fly-to bedside approach to cancer therapeutics.
Dr. Ross will discuss how he uses the fruit fly Drosophila to explore the promise and the challenges of personalized cancer therapeutics. Specifically, he will describe (i) how to build drugs with fly genetics and a supercomputer, and (ii) an unusual fly-to-bedside clinical trial in which he and his colleagues create personalized fly avatars and use robotics to identify therapeutics to treat patients.
