Welcome
Center for Cancer Systems Biology (CCSB)
at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston MA

Greetings from Dr Marc Vidal, Director

 The long-term goal of CCSB is to understand how macromolecular networks control biological processes and how perturbations in such networks can explain phenotypes and human disease.

Physical protein-protein interactions are instrumental for all biological processes. We address several fundamental questions regarding protein interactions. How are protein interactions organized at the scale of the whole cell? Are there global principles that organize such complex networks of interactions? What are the global topological features of networks and what do they mean? And how is the organization of cellular networks disrupted in human disease? (Flyer Summarizing CCSB Objectives)

Recent Achievements

• published Handbook of Systems Biology - Concepts and Insights (Marion Walhout, Marc Vidal, & Job Dekker, editors) a comprehensive, current and in-depth overview of the science of Systems Biology for researchers and students in genetics, molecular biology, cell biology, microbiology and biomedicine
• investigated at genome-scale perturbations of host interactome and transcriptome networks induced by individual gene products encoded by DNA tumor viruses (Interpreting cancer genomes using systematic host network perturbations by tumour virus proteins, Nature 2012)
• introduced an evolutionary model to explain de novo origin of genes (Proto-genes and de novo gene birth, Nature 2012)
•  applied a network-based framework to model phenotypic consequences of viral-host interactions (Viral perturbations of host networks reflect disease etiology, PLoS Comput Biol 2012)
•  exploited our systematic large-scale systems biology datasets for virus-host protein interactions to advance knowledge of specific facets of the progression of infectious disease (Identification of FAM111A as an SV40 host range restriction and adenovirus helper factor, PLoS Pathog 2012 & An RS motif within the Epstein-Barr virus BLRF2 tegument protein is phosphorylated by SRPK2 and is important for viral replication, PLoS ONE 2013)