Investigator Profile: An Interview with A. Thomas Look, M.D.

Abstract

Dr. Look received his M.D. degree and postgraduate training in Pediatrics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and completed his fellowship training in Pediatric Oncology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. He then accepted a faculty position at St. Jude and remained there for 20 years, ultimately becoming the Chair of the Experimental Oncology Department. In June 1999, he joined the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, as Vice-Chair for Research in Pediatric Oncology and Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Work in Dr. Look's laboratory focuses on the molecular pathogenesis of leukemia. His group has been credited with the identification and functional analysis of several chimeric oncogenes activated by chromosomal translocations, including the E2A-HLF transcription factor, which was shown to act through an evolutionarily conserved genetic pathway to promote leukemia cell survival. Their efforts in human T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia have revealed key multistep mutational pathways that drive the pathogenesis of this disease and demonstrated that NOTCH1 receptors are mutationally activated in a majority of these cases. More recently, Dr. Look's laboratory developed the first transgenic model of leukemia in the zebrafish, opening the way for chemical and genome-wide genetic modifier screens in a vertebrate disease model.