Chief, Molecular Pathology Section
Education:
Ph.D., 1981, Cancer Research Center, Moscow
M.A., 1977, Institute of Physics, UK
Biography
Dr. Lobanenkov received an M.A. in nuclear physics from the Institute of Physics in 1977 and a Ph.D. in experimental oncology from the Cancer Research Center, Moscow, in 1981. He was molecular carcinogenesis team leader in the All-Union Cancer Center of the former U.S.S.R. and a visiting scholar at the Royal Cancer Hospital, London, until 1990, where he discovered avian CTCF. He was invited to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle as a foreign faculty-in-residence funded by NIH grants.
In 1999, he became chief of the Molecular Pathology Section (MPS) in the Laboratory of Immunopathology where they first identified CTCF in Drosophila, mice, and humans – and later identified its paralogue BORIS. Dr. Lobanenkov’s team characterized the novel CTCF & BORIS proteins as being universally involved in the epigenetic regulation of mammalian cellular and viral genomes. His section, which moved to the Laboratory of Immunogenetics in 2012, currently works to understand how genome-wide, CTCF/BORIS-binding sequences regulate different functions, including inter- and intra-chromosomal 3D DNA-looping interactions, mono-allelic expression of imprinted and non-imprinted genes, X-chromosome inactivation, and regulation of stem/germ cell-specific promoters associated with targeted DNA demethylation.