DNA scientist to speak in Vancouver

VANCOUVER — If you’ve never heard of DNA methylation, you can learn about the subject when Prof. Howard Cedar comes to the city.

The man known worldwide as the father of DNA methylation – chemical changes in the DNA molecule – delivers a seminar titled Silence of the Genes at UBC Life Sciences Institute from 11 a.m. to noon on April 22.

Cedar is the guest of Canadian Friends of Hebrew University (CFHU-) this month when he comes into Vancouver to celebrate the pending opening of the new Institute of Medical Research Israel Canada (IMRIC) at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

CFHU is hoping to raise some $50 million in the next few years to make the institute a reality. When its doors open, the IMRIC will consolidate a number of areas of bio-research at the Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine in Ein Kerem, Jerusalem, thereby facilitating multi-disciplinary collaboration. Those fields are infectious disease and immunology, cancer, genetics and developmental biology, nutrition and metabolism, cardiovascular disease, and the brain and the central nervous system.

Cedar will be one of the faculty members to relocate his office to the new institute, and though the move sounds organizational, it’s much more than that, he says. “This change towards multidisciplinary collaboration between the biological and medical sciences is going on all over the world,” he says.

“If you want to study a disease, the only way to do it is by bringing people from different disciplines together so they can have day-to-day contact and use common equipment and facilities.”

Cedar should know. His research may have groundbreaking implications in the study and possible future remedy of cancer and has already received acclaim. He won the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Israel – the Wolf Prize, last year, receiving $100,000 for his work.

The process of DNA methylation turns on and off the 40,000-odd genes in the body. While everyone inherits genetic information, it has to be used in a programmed manner, Cedar explains. “That programming is called epigenetics, and the older one gets, the more likely the programming mechanism is to make mistakes. Changes in epigenetics could predispose a person to cancer, and in only five per cent of cancer cases is methylation not involved.”

Cedar is an observant father of six who was born in the United States. After medical school, he received his doctorate from New York University in 1970. He conducted research at the U.S. National Institutes of Health before making aliyah with his wife, Tzippi, and accepting a position at the Jerusalem medical school’s department of cellular biochemistry and human genetics 36 years ago.

 Thanks to his work on the fundamentals of DNA methylation since the early 1970s, the field has expanded.

“There are a number of diseases in which DNA methylation plays a very big role, and as a result new methodologies are now being used, which are enriching the field, as well as work being done on a drug that can inhibit DNA methylation,” Cedar says.

But research is in its relatively early stages, he adds. “In mice, there are a number of different tumours that can be prevented by using agents that prevent DNA methylation, but it’s a very big step to go from mice to people.”

Cedar is a modest man who shies away from celebrity and describes curiosity as his main motivator. “No one starts off saying, I’m going to cure this, but the nice thing is that when you do your research, often you discover something that will be part of the big picture in the end,” he says.

“That’s as important as curing the disease, because it provides information and concepts for other scientists, to help them do their work. So I’ll be very happy if my contribution helps by allowing someone else do something practical.”