The Administration and Education Core provides educational and outreach activities in aspects of quantitative cancer systems biology. The activities are open both to internally the ICBP members and externally to the greater scientific community. All courses and seminars will be available on the internet and will be recorded by streaming video so that those interested are able to view the lectures at their leisure.

Mathematical Systems Biology of Cancer 2, October 24-26, 2007

This 3-day workshop, held at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), Berkeley, CA will, as last year, focus on the application of mathematical and computational tools to understand the properties of cancer and other biological systems. It is recognized that many biological processes cannot be understood by studying individual components. Instead, it is the interactions between these components that define the properties of the system. The past thirty years has seen the identification of dozens of processes and hundreds of genes or proteins that become disregulated during cancer development. While certain types of cancers share common properties, each cancer is a unique genetic disease where mutations in many components and pathways interact. A systems based approach has the greatest chance of determining the system malfunctions that cause each individual's disease and of identifying effective treatments.

This workshop is designed to encourage and support the mathematical community's involvement in the effort to study cancer using system approaches. Conference presenters will include mathematicians and computer scientists presently involved in systems approaches to cancer and more general fields of biology. These presenters will cover general approaches to systems biology including analysis of genome scale data as well as statistical, continuous, and hybrid methods for pathway modeling. The workshop will also provide tutorials covering the use of tools and methods in systems biology as well as on the fundamental biological processes involved in cancer. In addition, the workshop will provide travel support for students and postdocs from the mathematical sciences to foster interest in this field.

From a biological perspective, the workshop will capitalize on work being performed by Investigators at LBNL, SRI, and UCSF who study the signaling networks associated with breast cancer. The program is developing high throughput assays to characterize these cell lines and examine how they respond to manipulations of key genes. Assays include mRNA expression profiling, measurements of protein abundance, and phenotypic responses using high content screening microscopy. Data and models from this program will be shared at this workshop (prior to publication) for examination and analysis by the participants. It is hoped that participants become engaged in these problems for the long term and that the LBNL led effort will continue to provide data and models for analysis in the future. LBNL even intends to allow its experimental infrastructure to be used to test hypotheses generated by meeting participants in future years.

Previous participants are strongly encouraged to attend again, and should notify the conference organizers if they have work that utilizes data from the Integrative Cancer Biology Program http://icbp.nci.nih.gov/ that may be of general interest.

Registration: http://www.msri.org/calendar/workshops/WorkshopInfo/436/show_workshop
Administrative contact: Ciccina Guagliardo.

The first Workshop was held May 3-6, 2006:
Data Analysis Pathway Workshop 2006: Mathematical Systems Biology of Cancer, at MSRI, Berkeley, CA A Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) workshop, co-sponsored by LBNL and SRI International. The focus was on the application of mathematical and computational tools to understand the properties of cancer and other biological systems.
Information.

Summer Cancer Research Fellowship Program 2007 (closed)

The NCI/NIH ICBP has announced the Summer Cancer Research Fellowship Program for 2007. This Summer Cancer Research Fellowship program provides a unique opportunity for nine eligible sophomore or junior college students to engage in innovative, integrative biology approaches to cancer research through the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Integrative Cancer Biology Program (ICBP). The ICBP, composed of nine multidisciplinary centers across the United States, focuses on the analysis of cancer as a complex biological system. Researchers within each ICBP center utilize the integration of experimental biology with mathematical and computational modeling to gain new insights into the biology and possible management of cancer.

Selected student participants are paired with an ICBP faculty-mentor from a participating center based on the students' indicated research interests. Through mentored research projects and/or laboratory work, faculty lectures, seminars, discussions and other activities, the nine students will gain an understanding and appreciation of major questions currently under investigation as well as the novel approaches being used within the ICBP Centers. For complete information about this Program, download this brochure.

The following project is offered at LBNL:
Mentor: Paul Spellman, Ph.D..
PI: Joe Gray, Ph.D.

"Application of Dynamical Signaling Models to Breast Cancer Drug Response"
The undergraduate intern will be responsible for applying ODE based models of ErbB signaling to understand response of normal and malignant breast cancer cell lines. To facilitate model application and construction, a Protege based knowledge environment is being constructed and the undergraduate intern will be expected to help in this effort. Work may also include generating training set or validation data for one or more cell lines using traditional and high throughput technologies.

For a description of all project choices, please visit: http://icbp.nci.nih.gov/FellowshipProgram.

Submissions no longer accepted; Please await information about participation in the 2008 Program.

ICBP Seminars and research meetings

The Core organizes meetings featuring speakers from the ICBP, BMS Program, SPORE and collaborating institutions. They are intended to be highly interactive forums to brainstorm, educate, and plan future work. External speakers are also invited as ICBP interests dictate. Periodic “brainstorming” sessions are included to stimulate informal discussions of topics of local interest and/or to plan new research or core activities. Additional ICBP and project seminars and research meetings (internal and external) are scheduled on an ad-hoc basis.
Information bi-weekly ICBP meetings.