The Meyerson Lab

Cancer genomics: Cancer is a disease of the genome.  Somatic alterations including mutations, copy number alterations, and translocations drive the development of cancer.  The Meyerson laboratory is dedicated to discovering cancer genome alterations using microarray and sequencing platforms at the Broad Institute and at the Center for Cancer Genome Discovery at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.  Research efforts are focused on lung cancer and on The Cancer Genome Atlas program of the National Cancer Institute.

Lung cancer biology: Lung cancer is the leading cause of human cancer death in the United States and world-wide.  We couple our work in genome discovery to functional studies of lung cancer cell lines and mouse models.  Our current efforts focus on understanding the role of EGFR mutation and of amplification of lineage-specific oncogenes including NKX2-1 and SOX2, in lung cancer pathogenesis.

Targeted therapies for cancer:  We can now effectively treat some cancers by disabling activated oncogenes.  Our work is focused on identifying mutations in protein kinase genes and determining the effects of enzymatic inhibitors on specific mutants in the EGFR and FGFR families.

Cancer and chromatin: Tumor suppressor genes and oncogenes modulate the modifications of histones, thereby controlling gene expression.  We have shown roles for the menin and parafibromin/hCdc73 tumor suppressor proteins in chromatin regulation.

Pathogen discovery: Many human diseases are suspected to be caused by pathogens but the specific microbe is unknown.  We have developed a sequence-based computational subtraction method and a cloud computing based computational pipeline known as PathSeq. We are applying this approach to cancers and autoimmune diseases.