Principal Investigator Douglas Lauffenburger
Co-investigators Richard Hynes , Tyler Jacks , Michael Yaffe , Forest White , Jacob White , Frank Gertler , Leona Samson , Phillip Sharp , Bruce Tidor , Jianzhu Chen
Project Website http://web.mit.edu/icbp/
Established with funding by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the Integrative Cancer Biology Program (ICBP) is an initiative designed to gain new insights into the development and progression of cancer through a systems-wide approach. NCI's goal is that ICBP will take advantage of the explosion in research and technology to comprehensively weave together the disparate pieces of knowledge and reveal how cancer develops and progresses within the context of the human system.
An integrative and multi-disciplinary effort among all fields of cancer research will be applied, incorporating a spectrum of new technologies such as genomics, proteomics, and molecular imaging, to generate computer and mathematical models that could help elucidate the cancer process. Research conducted through the ICBP could ultimately lead to the development of improved cancer interventions.
ICBP will focuses on three main research projects: cell proliferation, DNA repair and cell migration. These processes are involved in cancer initiation and progression.
The NCI grant also includes funds for the establishment of two core research resources at the Institute that are planned to support the projects in a cost-effective fashion. The Bioinformatics, Computation and Modeling Resource will provide expert bioinformatics support for data analysis and data mining by scientists working in the individual projects as well as high-end computation that will be essential for handling the large volumes of data that will be subjected to computational modeling.
The second resource will develop RNA interference (RNAi) technology and will provide RNAi reagents, advice, and assistance to enable individual projects to test modeling predictions in both cellular and animal systems.
A final essential component of the ICBP provides funding for education and outreach initiatives. Funds are included for graduate student training, pilot programs for post-doctoral researchers and support for courses taught through the MIT Computational and Systems Biology Initiative.
The outreach effort will involve making the models and data accessible to the larger cancer research community, enabling other scientists to validate the usefulness of the ICBP models as a predictive tool. One important collaborator will be NCI's cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) program, which will coordinate all the bioinformatics software needed by ICBP and provide NCI's research partners access to the information generated by ICBP centers.
The research is organized into three programs, each involving scientists working at different levels of analysis -- cancer biology, cell biology and computational modeling. The members of each program interact closely to integrate these different approaches to understand the underlying molecular and cellular processes that govern each process and to develop testable models to drive future understanding, analysis and intervention into those processes and their malfunctions in cancer.
The scientists involved in this program are from diverse departments at MIT, including the Center for Cancer Research, the Division of Biological Engineering, Biology, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. both faculty and trainees (students, postdoctorals) from these different disciplines interact within the context of ICBP to produce a level of analysis and understanding that no one discipline could achieve. Importantly,the interactions and training occurring within ICBP@MIT are producing the next generation of integrative cancer biologists, facile in both cancer biology and computational modeling.