The mission of this laboratory is to understand both the mechanisms of disease (cancer, infection and genetic diseases), and the complex genetic programs of mammalian development and stem cell biology. We monitor these processes noninvasively as they occur in living animals. The methods developed and used by our group can simultaneously reveal the nuances and the overall picture of cellular and molecular processes in animal models. Using these approaches, we can rapidly assess the effects of antineoplastic therapies, antibiotics or antiviral drugs, revealing possible modes of action. These strategies result in significantly more information than can be obtained using a vivisectionist approach in that the animals are living and the data is obtained in real-time. One of our scientific goals is to develop tools that make the body essentially transparent for scientific discovery, and to use these tools to understand how pathogens cause disease and how the host organism responds to these pathogens, as well as how the immune system monitors cell transformation in cancer, and the regulatory networks that control cell migration and development.
