Recorded: 08 May 2012
We, yes, we work with the Dream Team of the Stand Up To Cancer. We actually work with four teams now, we’re on the Breast Cancer Dream Team, we’re working with the Dream Team that looks at the PI-3 Kinase pathways, we’re talking about the Melanoma Dream Team, The Prostate Dream Team, and others. So it’s, I think it’s very important that there be a unifying computational platform that we developed that enables cancer research and we want to work with a number of different focused campus – cancer efforts - to supply that, including new approaches to cancer, in particular Melanoma, there have been therapies that are based on stimulating your own immune system to fight the cancer that are – that have shown to be successful so there are some stunning results and I think the other thing cancer genomics can do is help us to understand how to mobilize the patient’s own immune system…
…to eliminate the cancer. You need to teach the immune system what it needs to be attacking and we need to understand more of immunology so that we can tweak the immune system and the, and the cellular environment of the cancer so that the cancer cannot evade the immune system. So, once we know how to fix it so the cancer can’t evade it, it can’t hide, and the immune system is trained to attack it, then that is actually our most powerful enemy because if the cancer mutates then the immune system can then mutate again to provide new T-cells that will be receptors to the various antigens presented by the cancer cells.
David Haussler (born 1953) is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, professor of biomolecular engineering and director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) on the UC Santa Cruz campus, and a consulting professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and UC San Francisco Biopharmaceutical Sciences Department.