UC Santa Cruz

It is difficult to find a more devastating illness packaged into a single word than “cancer”. Cancer is in fact a large collection of illnesses that share similar behaviors and outcomes. Cancers arise from lesions in cell-cycle regulation that ultimately allow aberrant cell proliferation which may result in tumor growth, angiogenesis, metastasis, and a destructive takeover of surrounding tissues which may inevitably lead to the death of the organism. The challenge to overcoming cancer, and why a “cure” for cancer is a misnomer, is that at the root of this family of diseases is an evolutionarily advantageous mechanism: cell survival and proliferation. Without these traits we ourselves would not survive. With these traits comes the risk of cancer. There is no cure for cancer because we cannot dissolve the very thing that allows us to live as the complex multi-cellular organisms that we are. We can however harness a better understanding of the pathways that regulate cell proliferation and cancer, and pursue therapeutic strategies that are intelligently created with this knowledge. While I touched on both of these areas throughout my years at UCSC, this piece focuses on my contributions toward understand the mechanism of a critical cell-cycle repressor. Chapter 2 describes my research toward understanding the importance of chromatin-modifying complexes in the transcriptional regulation of the cell-cycle.