Overview

The mission of the Kirk Center for Childhood Cancer and Immunological Disorders spans a wide range of biomedical topics, addressing their basic aspects and their clinical manifestations. Our growing understanding of the molecular basis of disease offers exciting possibilities, whereby basic research, driven primarily by scientific curiosity, can directly contribute to novel clinical applications, offerding new diagnostic and therapeutic modalities.

Among recent developments:

• A wealth of information, mostly from mouse models, about disease-associated genes, enabling targeted over-expression, "knock-out" and "knock-in" of particular genes.
• Powerful technologies that may be used to establish "disease models" in experimental animals, enabling a deeper understanding of the disease process, and the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic tools.
• A critical "enabling facility" recently established at the Weizmann Institute is the Lorry I. Lokey Preclinical Research Facility, where such disease models will be developed.
• Remarkable progress in our understanding of the genetic background of cancer, and the molecular processes that drive the transformation of cells from a normal to malignant state, are likely to provide access to novel cancer therapies.
• Progress in the characterization of the cellular workings of the immune system - including the nature of the diverse cell types that drive and regulate the immune response - enables studies into the mechanisms underlying immune reactions, autoimmune processes and inflammatory responses.
• The recent development of powerful research technologies, including diverse imaging platforms, analytical, genomic and proteomic tools and the like, will have a major impact on future biomedical research and its applications at the patient's bedside.