Erik Ranheim: Research Team & Goals

My own laboratory is relatively small, I have a couple of graduate students and a technician, one of the graduate students just recently defended her thesis, however as an entire team the sort of translational lymphoma research team at the University of WI, which is largely formed in response to the four lymphoma projects and efforts, involve basically four components, the first on the clinical side is the doctors who are actually taking care of and treating lymphoma patients such as Brad Kahl and Julie Chang. The second is in part what I am a hematopathologist, so the group of doctors who are actually diagnosing the type of lymphoma the patient has and offering suggestions as to whether the patient may fall in a good or bad prognostic group and that may influence the clinicians in terms of how aggressively they choose to treat any given patient. Some of those Hematopatholgists and these include David Yang, Ken Young, and Catherine Leith and myself are also involved in either translational or basic research. The translational basic research members of the team, Peiman Hematti, Shigeki Miyamoto, and myself are really trying to work towards taking basic knowledge about the biology of the lymphocytes, the biology of cancer cells and then finding ways that we can use in human systems and of course again, that’s initially either in a culture dish or sometimes we can put human cancer cells into animal models like mice and see whether new therapeutics might be effective at killing the cells, based on the science that we did initially in mice or in a culture dish. The goals that this group has are to take what already exists as strong individual researchers and see whether by sort of joining together and exchanging ideas and interacting and using the expertise of individuals to further and better the projects whether we can make this stuff happen faster. An example is my own work looking at this Wendt-Frizzled pathway that I described, combined with Peiman Hematti who is interested on how what we call stromel cells or basically the scaffolding cells that live in the bone marrow and lymph nodes around the lymphoma cells and how they might be helping the lymphoma cells to grow or survive, and the two of us are now looking at whether some of these signaling pathways that converge on beta-catenin might be coming from rather then from the lymphoma cells themselves these supporting cells. And if we’re working individually neither one of us has the expertise to do the entire project. We’ve developed a really excellent website in collaboration with our partners and that’s at www.forwardlymphoma.org.