Kemp, Christopher

The goal of our research is to understand how environmental exposure to carcinogens interacting with the genetic susceptibility of the host leads to cancer. As a basic research laboratory, we study multistage carcinogenesis in the mouse in order to model the entire natural history of neoplastic development from the initiated cell to clonal evolution to a fully malignant tumor. This has the following benefits: the influence of the host genetic background (e.g., susceptibility and resistance loci or modifier genes) can be studied; the role of particular genes can be studied using transgenic and knockout mice; somatic genetic or epigenetic changes (e.g., mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes) driving clonal neoplastic evolution and their phenotypic consequences can be studied in detail; and finally the specific effects of different carcinogen treatments on tumor development can be studied. More recently we are using mouse models of cancer to improve methods for biomarker discovery and validation using proteomics, micro RNA and other approaches for the early detection of cancer or for monitoring tumor response to therapy.