Professor, Obstetrics and Gynecology; Feinberg School of Medicine
Signal Transduction in Cancer,Women's Cancer
debu@northwestern.edu
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Dr. Chakravarti has been recruited from the University of Pennsylvania to the Northwestern University and now provides leadership of the basic sciences Hormone Action and Signal Transduction (HAST) program of the cancer center. He is also the Co-director of the Division of Reproductive Biology Research. The Chakravarti laboratory is interested in understanding steroid hormone and vitamin signaling, transcriptional abnormalities in cancer development and progression, and epigenomics. In this effort the Chakravarti laboratory made an original discovery and demonstrated that a novel SET-oncoprotein containing complex termed INHAT regulates chromatin modification and nuclear hormone receptor signaling including retinoid and estrogen receptor functions. In addition to SET being an oncoprotein, another subunit of the INHAT complex, the nuclear phosphoprotein pp32 has been linked to cell growth and prostate cancer.The Chakravarti laboratory has recently discovered and is currently characterizing members of the novel THAP family of proteins with regard to their abilities to regulate cell growth and cancer progression. Finally, we are investigating the role of epigenomic signal transducer proteins in hormone action, and breast, prostate and colon cancer cell growth and progression. We feel that our work basic science-oriented research has both clinical and translational implications in understanding and future treatments of cancer.
