Professor Ashok Venkitaraman

Interests

The role of chromosomal instability in cancer pathogenesis, and its exploitation in new approaches to therapy, are being explored in our lab using a range of approaches from structural biology (top) to biochemistry to cell biology and chemical biology (middle) to studies on preclinical models and cancer patients (bottom).
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Human cancer cells almost always contain abnormal chromosomes, yet the connections between chromosomal instability and carcinogenesis are poorly understood. Our laboratory aims not only to understand how cells maintain normal chromosome structure and number, and why maintenance should break down in cancer cells, but also to translate this knowledge to improvements in cancer diagnosis and treatment. We employ a wide range of approaches from molecular cell biology and somatic cell genetics, to structural biology, biophysics, imaging and chemical biology.

We actively translate molecular insights from our studies to clinical practice. In particular, we participate in The Cambridge Molecular Therapeutics Programme, a multidisciplinary effort that aims to pioneer innovative new approaches for the discovery and early clinical development of small molecule drugs against cancer.

Research Focus

Keywords

DNA repair

Mitosis

Cancer Therapeutics

Drug Discovery

Imaging

Cancer sites

breast

ovary

pancreas

Equipment

Bioinformatics

Biosensor

Cell culture

Computational modelling

Confocal microscopy

Fluorescence microscopy

Gene expression profiling

Imaging

In vivo modelling

Protein biochemistry

Protein purification

Proteomics

Recombinant protein expression

RNAi

X-ray crystallography