NKI Friday seminar by Don Cleveland
Scrambling the genome in cancer: Chromothripsis and extrachromosomal DNA
Don Cleveland
Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, University of California, San Diego, USA
Don Cleveland is Professor and Chair of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at UC San Diego, a member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, and an elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine. He has identified principles of genome instability in cancer, demonstrating that single chromosome missegregation can trigger repeated chromosome shattering (chromothripsis) that initiates and drives genome evolution in cancer. In 2019, he received India’s Genome Valley Excellence Award. In neurosciences, he received the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for uncovering mechanisms underlying ALS and development of “designer DNA drugs” for silencing disease-causing genes for the major diseases of the nervous system.