SCHOOL OF MEDICINE • DEPARTMENT OF MEDICINE

Dr. Markowitz is a Howard Hughes investigator and the Francis Wragg Ingalls Professor of Cancer Genetics in the Department of Medicine (Hematology-Oncology) and the Ireland Cancer Center, with coappointment in the Department of Molecular Biology, at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He is also an attending physician at University Hospitals of Cleveland.

He received his B.A. degree in physics and chemistry from Harvard University. He received his M.D. and his Ph.D. degrees in cell biology from Yale University, where he worked with Vincent Marchesi. Dr. Markowitz did clinical training in internal medicine at the University of Chicago and in medical oncology at the National Cancer Institute and he did postdoctoral research at NCI in the laboratory of John Minna.

His laboratory studies molecular abnormalities in colon cancer including studies of colon cancer suppressor genes and oncogenes, studies of the functions of positive and negative regulatory growth factors, and studies of the role of genomic instability in inherited and sporadic colon cancers.

Some of the achievements to date include: identification of a group of "mutator" genes whose inactivation induces genomic instability and is responsible for many cases of inherited and sporadic colon cancer; discovery that TGF-beta is a negative regulatory growth factor in the gut and that TGF-beta receptors are tumor suppressor genes that are mutated in many colon and gastric cancers; demonstration that p53 is a colon cancer suppressor gene; identification of a casette of colon cancer suppressor genes that are silenced by aberrant methylation, and mapping of a new gene causing familial colon cancer to human chromosome 9.

Ongoing interests in the lab include cloning new tumor suppressor genes and new genes causing familial colon cancer, elucidation of the TGF-ß signal transduction pathway, development of molecular based assays for cancer detection, and elucidation of genes involved in cancer metastases.