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Professor Karen Cichowski is the founder and Director of the Center for Targeted Cancer Therapies at the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Hospital Cancer Center. She has a longstanding interest in understanding how deregulated signaling pathways drive cancer and in using this insight to develop new therapies.  To this end, she has successfully developed several promising combination therapies for Ras- pathway driven tumors that are currently being evaluated in clinical trials. More recently, she has been studying the convergence of oncogenic signaling pathways and epigenetics in cancer and has made several fundamental discoveries related to how defects in the in PRC2 complex drive cancer development and progression.  

The Cichowski lab will contribute to the Grand Challenge project with her expertise in epigenetics and signaling and in exploiting various mouse modeling approaches to deconstruct complex mechanisms of pathogenesis. She has broad expertise in studying many different types of cancers that will be investigated in this Grand Challenge