Michael Wigler, PhD and James Hicks, PhD

The BCRF-supported team at Cold Spring Harbor is paving a technological path in breast cancer research that has many potential applications in the clinical setting and is poised to bring about advances in technology, data interpretation, and gene discovery that will benefit the patient. Major progress has been made towards determining the epicenters of genome instability in breast cancer, correlating genome instability with prognosis, developing improved alternatives to fluorescent-in-situ-hybridization for the determination of important pathology-related parameters, and understanding the growth and evolution of breast tumors through genomic analysis. In 2011-12, Drs. Wigler and Hicks plan to initiate the examination of changes in DNA at the individual cell level as markers to aid in the control and early detection of breast cancer.