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Boston Globe reporter Carolyn Johnson writes on today's about the push to target cancer with new therapies — among many specialists, the piece quotes Todd Golub, director of the Ó³»­´«Ã½'s Cancer Program. Todd and other colleagues discussed the Ó³»­´«Ã½'s approach to cancer research in the new Annual Report:

• Develop a comprehensive catalogue of all mutations in a tumor, in order to understand how genes collaborate to drive the disease;

At the 5th annual RNAi (RNA interference) and miRNA (microRNA) World Congress held recently in Boston, David Root, Director of the RNAi Platform at the Ó³»­´«Ã½, gave the keynote presentation. I recently caught up with David and asked him to help explain the fundamentals behind RNA interference technology and why it is such a valuable tool for learning about what specific genes do.

Q1. What is the value of studying RNA interference?

Rakesh Karmacharya spends one day each week treating severely ill psychotic patients as the medical director of the Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Research Clinic at McLean Hospital, a Harvard psychiatric hospital in Belmont, MA. The rest of his professional week is spent at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ where he works as a physician-scientist in the Chemical Biology Program. For several years, Rakesh has been bringing these two worlds together in the form of a project to identify how clozapine, the main drug used for treatment of schizophrenia, exerts its therapeutic effects.