Cancer as a Genetic Disease

In this talk, biomedical scientist Charles Sawyers discusses how understanding the mutations that cause cancer can guide the development of targeted drug therapies.

Despite decades of research, cancer continues to be a major cause of death in the United States. Advances in cancer biology have led to the development of targeted drugs as new and effective treatment options for some types of cancer. Sawyers presents an overview of cancer biology and describes how understanding the molecular mechanisms involved in one type of cancer, chronic myeloid leukemia, resulted in the development of Gleevec, one of the first targeted cancer drugs.

This talk is from a 2013 Holiday Lecture Series, Medicine in the Genomic Era.