The Laboratory of Angel Lee, M.D., Ph.D., focuses on understanding how signaling pathways activated by receptor tyrosine kinases regulate cell growth, survival and differentiation.

There are two areas of interest. The first is in hematopoietic systems (myeloid progenitors and bone marrow-derived macrophages) and is directed at the signaling pathways downstream of the Colony Stimulating Factor-1 Receptor (CSF-1R). We are specially interested in basic mechanisms that could provide a basis for therapeutic intervention in cancers involving receptor tyrosine kinases. As the CSF-1R is a key receptor for macrophages, we are also very interested in how CSF-1R mediated pathways in myeloid cells contribute to diseases with a chronic inflammatory component such as cancer (tumor associated macrophages).

The second area of interest is the role of signaling molecules and scaffolding proteins in neurogenesis, using murine embryonic stem cells and primary neural stem cells as models. In this project, we are interested in determining what governs neural stem cell proliferation and fate specification, in the hopes that our findings will provide information useful in areas of brain injury and repair.

Given the complexity of the systems we study, my lab uses a systems biology approach. The aim is to integrate experimental findings from genomics and proteomics with computational analysis and consider the participating molecules as part of a network. This approach should provide novel insights into cancer and those insights may lead to new drug developments and better understanding and design of complicated drug regimens.

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