Five questions

At the Broad, collaboration is king. But in order to share ideas and data, scientists need a robust infrastructure that can support the volume and speed at which results are produced. That’s where Chief Information Officer Martin Leach and his team of experts in information technology and research computing come in. Their goal is to provide the software and technology that will enable the best collaboration experience, which will in turn accelerate groundbreaking science to transform medicine.

Senior associate member Matthew Meyerson recalls the line that opens the novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Just like unhappy families, every cancer genome that he and his colleagues study is abnormal in its own way. But by looking across cancer samples and cancer types, researchers are beginning to appreciate cancer’s patterns of convergence.

In a paper published January 5, 2011 in Science Translational Medicine, Anna Mandinova and Sam Lee, both researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and associate members of the Broad, describe the obstacles and promise of developing small compounds that target the p53 pathway, the most common pathway involved in cancer. I asked them both to discuss the challenges of finding p53-targeted molecules and the approaches they are currently working on.

Your immune system is quite clever. It can sense when bacteria, viruses, or pathogens are invading, distinguish among them, and respond accordingly. But an overactive or improperly functioning immune system can lead to a variety of problems such as auto-immune diseases like lupus or diseases related to inflammation, such as hardening of the arteries (atherosclerosis). Nir Hacohen and his colleagues at the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital want to find out more about the intricacies of how the immune system works and how it relates to these diseases.