Prof. Stephen Baylin Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, USA

Dr. Stephen Baylin obtained his MD from Duke University and did post-doctoral fellowships at the National Institutes of Health and at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine before joining the faculty at this latter institution. He is currently the Ludwig Professor of Oncology and Medicine and Associate Director for Basic... read moreResearch at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. For the last twenty years, Dr. Baylin and his colleagues have studied the role of aberrant epigenetic gene silencing, in association with gene promoter hypermethylation, in the progression of cancer. They have helped to define the genes involved with this process and to establish the fact the epigenetic silencing of these genes provides an alternative to coding region mutations for inducing loss of tumor suppressor gene function. They are now defining new means to screen cancer genomes for such genes, establish the position of the gene silencing in the stages of neoplastic evolution, determine what aspects of chromatin formation may initiate and/or maintain the silencing, and exploiting the potential of hypermethylated gene sequences to serve as markers for cancer risk assessment and diagnosis and for targeting the reversal of the gene silencing as a cancer prevention or treatment strategy.