Organizing Committee Member
James E.Trosko
Professor
Michigan State University
USA
Biography
James E. Trosko completed his PhD at the age of 25 years from Michigan State University and spent 3 years as a postdoctoral fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory under Drs. Ernest Chu; Dr. Sheldon Wolff and Dr. Richard Setlow. After joining Michigan State University, he worked with Dr. Barnett Rosenberg on the characterization of the anti-cancer drug, Cis-platin. He obtained an NCI- Career Development award; spent one year at the McArdle Lab for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin under Dr. Van R. Potter. Later he was Chief of Research at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation for two years in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. He spent 2 years at Seoul National University as a Korean World Class University Professor. He also spent one year at the ARNAS-Civico-Regional Cancer Hospital in Palermo, Sicily. He is currently an MSU-Distinguished Emeritus Professor. He has published more than 450 papers.
Research Area
Dr. Trosko's laboratory pioneered in the research on DNA repair in cells of normal humans and those of the skin cancer-prone, xeroderma pigmentosum. He also was the first to discover that epigenetic tumor promoters inhibited gap junctional inter cellular communication. His lab also was the first to isolate human adult organ specific stem cells (kidney-1987; breast 1995). He demonstrated that these human breast stem cells were the target cells for producing breast cancer stem cells. Later he proposed these human organ-specific adult stem cells be used to screen for new drugs and toxicants when grown in 3-dimensional in vitro cultures. Lastly, he has proposed that the mechanism underlying the Barker hypothesis was the increased or decreased number of organ-specific stem cells during early development.