Unlike certain cancer types for which preventative therapies exist, there is no known way to prevent blood cancers. The goal of this project is to understand the causes of variation between different individuals in their blood cancer susceptibility during aging, with the ultimate goal of developing intervention strategies to stop this process. This will be performed through large-scale screening and functional characterization of germline modifiers of leukemia development in a cohort of diversity outbred mice, representing nearly the entire genetic repertoire of the species.
Dr. Trowbridge is an Associate Professor and Dattels Family Endowed Chair at The Jackson Laboratory, where she has had her independent laboratory since 2012. She also holds adjunct faculty appointments at Tufts University School of Medicine and the University of Maine. She received her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Western Ontario in 2006 and completed postdoctoral training with Dr. Stuart Orkin at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Trowbridge’s research interests span hematopoiesis, stem cell biology, aging, and cancer biology.