The Institute of Cancer Research is a public research institute and a member institution of the University of London in London, United Kingdom, specialising in oncology. It was founded in 1909 as a research department of the Royal Marsden Hospital and joined the University of London in 2003. It has been responsible for a number of breakthrough discoveries, including that the basic cause of cancer is damage to DNA.
Melanoma, also redundantly known as malignant melanoma, is a type of skin cancer that develops from the pigment-producing cells known as melanocytes. Melanomas typically occur in the skin, but may rarely occur in the mouth, intestines, or eye. In women, they most commonly occur on the legs, while in men, they most commonly occur on the back. About 25% of melanomas develop from moles. Changes in a mole that can indicate melanoma include an increase in size, irregular edges, change in color, itchiness, or skin breakdown.
Uveal melanoma is a type of eye cancer in the uvea of the eye. It is traditionally classed as originating in the iris, choroid, and ciliary body, but can also be divided into class I and class II. Symptoms include blurred vision, loss of vision or photopsia, but there may be no symptoms.
The phosphatidylinositol-4,5-bisphosphate 3-kinase, catalytic subunit alpha, also called p110α protein, is a class I PI 3-kinase catalytic subunit. The human p110α protein is encoded by the PIK3CA gene.
Oncogenomics is a sub-field of genomics that characterizes cancer-associated genes. It focuses on genomic, epigenomic and transcript alterations in cancer.
CDKN2A, also known as cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor 2A, is a gene which in humans is located at chromosome 9, band p21.3. It is ubiquitously expressed in many tissues and cell types. The gene codes for two proteins, including the INK4 family member p16 and p14arf. Both act as tumor suppressors by regulating the cell cycle. p16 inhibits cyclin dependent kinases 4 and 6 and thereby activates the retinoblastoma (Rb) family of proteins, which block traversal from G1 to S-phase. p14ARF activates the p53 tumor suppressor. Somatic mutations of CDKN2A are common in the majority of human cancers, with estimates that CDKN2A is the second most commonly inactivated gene in cancer after p53. Germline mutations of CDKN2A are associated with familial melanoma, glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer. The CDKN2A gene also contains one of 27 SNPs associated with increased risk of coronary artery disease.
MCF-7 is a breast cancer cell line isolated in 1970 from a 69-year-old White woman. MCF-7 is the acronym of Michigan Cancer Foundation-7, referring to the institute in Detroit where the cell line was established in 1973 by Herbert Soule and co-workers. The Michigan Cancer Foundation is now known as the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute.ESRAA AHMED
J. William Harbour, M.D., is an American ophthalmologist, ocular oncologist and cancer researcher. He is currently Chair of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. He previously served as the vice chair and director of ocular oncology at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute and associate director for basic science at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center of the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine.
Professor Carol L. Prives FRS is the Da Costa Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. She is known for her work in the characterisation of p53, an important tumor suppressor protein frequently mutated in cancer.
Varda Rotter is a German-born-Israeli cancer researcher.
Xin Lu is a Professor of Cancer Biology and Director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the University of Oxford. She is known for her discovery of and research on the ASPP family of proteins.
Richard Malcolm Marais is Director of the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Manchester Institute and Professor of Molecular Oncology at the University of Manchester.
Cédric Blanpain is a Belgian researcher in the field of stem cells. He is a tenured professor of developmental biology and genetics at Université Libre de Bruxelles and director of the stem cell and cancer lab at its Faculty of Medicine. He was one of the first researchers in the world to use cell lineage tracing in cancer research and he showed for the first time the existence of cancer stem cells in solid tumors in vivo. He was selected by Nature as one of 10 People who mattered most in 2012 and he received the outstanding young investigator award of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.
Jürgen Knoblich is a German molecular biologist. Since 2018, he is Scientific Director of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.
Moshe Yaniv, born in 1938 in Hadera, Israel, is a French-Israeli molecular biologist who has studied the structure and functions of oncogenic DNA viruses as well as the general mechanisms for regulating gene expression in higher organisms and their deregulation during tumor pathologies and development. He is a member of the French Academy of sciences and Professor Emeritus at the Institut Pasteur.
Xiaohong Rose Yang is an American biomedical scientist researching the genetics of dysplastic nevus syndrome and chordoma, and etiologic heterogeneity of breast cancer. She is a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute. Yang leads breast cancer studies in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.
María S. (Marisol) Soengas is a Spanish immunologist who is a professor at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO). Her research considers melanoma and the development of new therapeutic strategies. She was elected to the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2022.
Sophie Geneviève Elisabeth Martin Benton is a Swiss biologist who is Professor and Director of the Department of Fundamental Microbiology at the University of Lausanne. Her research investigates the molecular processes that underpin cellular fusion. She was awarded the EMBO Gold Medal in 2014.
Karina Elizabeth de Visser, also named "Karin E. de Visser", is a researcher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. Her research considers metastatic formation and how the immune system influences how people respond to cancer treatment.
Reuven Agami is a Dutch cancer researcher. He is a professor of Oncogenomics at Erasmus University Rotterdam and head of the section of Oncogenomics at the Netherlands Cancer Institute-Antoni van Leeuwenhoekziekenhuis.
