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 The Division of Molecular Medicine was established in 1996 as the focal point for basic and translational research programs investigating disease mechanisms at City of Hope. This focus continues today under the leadership of Dr Richard Jove, with an increasing emphasis on cancer, chemical biology, genomics and molecular therapeutics. Investigators have active research programs in cancer genetics, signal transduction and gene regulation, drug resistance, genetic risk, molecular pharmacology, clinical cancer genetics and molecular therapeutics. What unifies this diverse group of investigators is the desire to understand basic mechanisms underlying cancer and other diseases for the purpose of developing novel molecular therapeutics.
Moving forward into the future, Molecular Medicine will continue to expand in several major areas of emphasis: identification of new molecular targets for cancer therapy, development of synthetic small molecules and natural product derivatives for molecular-targeted therapies, and evaluation of genomic markers for predicting risk and response to therapy. These studies employ cutting-edge approaches and technologies, including microarray gene expression profiling, synthetic and medicinal chemistry, mass spectrometry and proteomics, high-throughput screening of compound libraries, structural biology and molecular modeling, bioinformatics and functional genomics.
 Because of the central role of chemistry in molecular therapeutics, Dr. David Horne has been appointed Associate Chair of the Division. The overall long-term goal of Molecular Medicine is to customize the prevention and treatment of cancer on an individualized basis. Reaching this goal involves the development of molecular-targeted therapies to match an individual’s genomic profile in order to achieve the most effective clinical response with the least toxicity. Realization of this goal requires collaborative multidisciplinary teams including basic, translational and clinical researchers throughout the Beckman Research Institute, National Medical Center, and Comprehensive Cancer Center at City of Hope.
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