Samuel Aparicio Ph.D.
Department Head , Molecular Oncology and Breast Cancer Program
BC Cancer Research Centre
Samuel Aparicio graduated in medical and natural sciences from Cambridge University (UK), clinical medicine from Oxford, and subsequently in internal medicine and pathology. After doctoral work with Sydney Brenner in Cambridge he held a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship at the Wellcome/CRUK Developmental Biology Institute. From 2000-2005 he was a senior investigator in the Department of Oncology, Cambridge. He was a co-leader of the international consortium that sequenced the genome of the pufferfish Fugu Rubripes in 2002. His group discovered the existence of a novel gatekeeper of the GnRH axis (GPR54) in 2003, leading to new avenues for therapeutic intervention. He also co-founded (1999) the UK and Singapore based biotech company Paradigm Therapeutics (now Takeda Cambridge), where he was director of science until 2004. He is currently the Nan and Lorraine Robertson Chair of Breast Cancer Research, based at UBC/BC Cancer Agency, Vancouver, Canada and a Canada Research Chair in molecular oncology. His work encompasses the fields of cancer genomics, mouse genetic models, high throughput screens, and translational breast cancer research
Talk Title: “MLL5 Function in Hematopoeisis and Leukemia; Implications for Therapy”