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Legendary Surgeon Maurice Galante Dies
Maurice Galante, M.D., a legendary master surgeon at UCSF and renaissance man, died on February 5, 2013. His career is memorialized by the Maurice Galante Lecture Program and Maurice Galante Distinguished Professorship.
Carlo C. Maley, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Director of the Center for Evolution and Cancer
Division of Adult Cardiothoracic Surgery
Thoracic Oncology Program
Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center
Contact Information
Room N215, Box 1351,
University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, CA 94143-0128
(415) 514-0592
(415) 502-3179 (Fax)
carlo.maley@ucsf.edu
BiographyEducation
- 1987-1991 B.A. Oberlin College (Computer Science/Psychology)
- 1991-1993 M.Sc. University of Oxford (Zoology, with W. D. Hamilton, Marshall Scholarship)
- 1993-1998 Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Computer Science, with R. Brooks at MIT, and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology with M. J. Donoghue at Harvard)
Postdoctoral Training
- 1998 Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University, Cambridge
- 1998-2000 Visiting Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow, University of New Mexico
Program Affiliations
- Thoracic Oncology Laboratory
- Thoracic Oncology Program
- UCSF Bioinformatics program
- UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center
- UCSF Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacogenomics program
Research Interests
- Applying phylogenetic methods to measure somatic evolution in neoplasms (e.g., in Barrett's Esophagus).
- Computational modeling of neoplastic progression.
- Harnessing clonal evolution to prevent cancer and cancer mortality.
- Measuring genetic diversity in neoplasms and testing if it predicts both progression and therapeutic resistance.
- Peto's paradox: Why don't whales, with 1000X more cells than humans, get 1000X more cancer?
- Single cell, high throughput sequencing of the (epi)genetics of neoplasms.
- Therapeutic resistance in acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
Biography
Carlo C. Maley, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery, a member of the Thoracic Oncology Program and a Principal Investigator in the Thoracic Oncology Lab and Maley Lab. The UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center has also tapped Dr. Maley to lead a new Center for Evolution and Cancer.
Dr. Maley received his B.A. in computer science and psychology from Oberlin College in 1991 and his M.Sc. in Zoology (evolutionary theory) from University of Oxford in 1993 where he worked with William D. Hamilton. In 1998, Dr. Maley received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT where he worked with Michael Donoghue and Rodney Brooks.
Dr. Maley did his postdoctoral training at the University of New Mexico, mentored by Professor Stephanie Forrest, and at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center by Dr. Brian Reid.
Prior to joining UCSF, Dr. Maley was an assistant professor at the Wistar Institute, and a member of two other graduate programs at the University of Pennsylvania: Genomics and Computational Biology, and Cellular and Molecular Biology.
Research Summary
Dr. Maley is interested in the evolution of cancer, both at the level of cells evolving in neoplasms and at the level of the effects of cancer as a selective pressure on multicellular organisms. The Maley laboratory is exploring fundamental concepts in neoplastic progression, the process by which normal tissue becomes cancerous, and the evolution of therapeutic resistance, for purposes of developing better methods for cancer prevention and therapy.
The Maley Laboratory studies the evolution of clones during neoplastic progression of Barrett's esophagus as well as the selective effects of therapy in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and esophageal adenocarcinoma. It is also developing the comparative biology of cancer to determine how large, long-lived organisms like whales are able to suppress cancer 1000-fold better than humans.
The Maley laboratory is applying evolutionary and ecological theory to neoplastic progression and cancer therapy in order to modulate the evolution of neoplastic cells and thereby prevent cancer and its relapse. It take three, mutually reinforcing approaches to these problems:
- Computational simulations to explore hypotheses
- Data mining of (and application of evolutionary theory to) genetic and epigenetic data from neoplasms
- Evolutionary experiments in tissue culture.
Selected Publications
- Merlo, L., Pepper, J., Reid, B.J., Maley, C.C.: Cancer as an evolutionary and ecological process. Nature Reviews Cancer, 6:924-35, 2006.
- Pepper, J.W., Findlay, C.S., Kassen, R., Spencer, S.L., and Maley, C.C.: Cancer research meets evolutionary biology. Evolutionary Applications 2:62-70, 2009.
- Maley, C.C., Galipeau, P.C., Finley, J.C., Wongsurawat, V.J., Li, X., Sanchez, C.A., Paulson, T.G., Blount, P.L., Risques, R., Rabinovitch, P.S. and Reid, B.J.: Genetic clonal diversity predicts progression to esophageal adenocarcinoma. Nature Genetics, 38:468-473, 2006.
- Pepper, J., Sprouffske, K., Maley, C.C.: Cell Differentiation Patterns Suppress Somatic Evolution. PLoS Computational Biology, 3:e250, 2007. Highlighted in Nature Online (http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070917/full/news070917-11.html) PMCID: PMC2134960
- Liu, Z., Venkatesh, S.S., Maley, C.C.: Sequence space coverage, entropy of genomes and the potential to detect non-human DNA in human samples. BMC Genomics, 9:509, 2008. PMCID: PMC2628393
In the News
The Relationship Between Cancer Evolution & Drug Resistance
UCSF Science Cafe - Jan 10, 2011In a far ranging interview with UCSF reporter Jeffrey Norris, Carlo C. Maley, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Surgery in the Thoracic Oncology Program, discussed cancer evolution, drug resistance, and the development of new treatment strategies. "The problem of building a multi-cellular organism is really the problem of suppressing cancer," said Dr. Maley, an expert in both evolutionary biology and bioinformatics. "How do you get cells to stop proliferating and to devote their resources to the good of the larger organism?"
Dr. Carlo C. Maley Joins UCSF Department of Surgery Faculty
Department of Surgery - Sep 01, 2010Carlo C. Maley, Ph.D.has joined the faculty as an Associate Professor in the Thoracic Oncology Program and Division of Adult Cardiothoracic Surgery. Dr. Maley is Director of the Maley Lab and is a Principal Investigator and Collaborator in the Thoracic Oncology Lab. Dr. Maley is focused on the evolution of cancer, specifically carcinogenesis, neoplastic progression, and therapeutic resistance, with the ultimate goal of preventing cancer and improving current therapies.
