Assistant Professor
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Sarah Johnstone, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician scientist interested in how the genome is epigenetically and topologically reorganized in cancer. Dr. Johnstone received her bachelor’s degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology with honors from the University of Chicago. She completed her Ph.D. in Genetics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she performed her doctoral work in the laboratory of Dr. Richard Young. At MIT Sarah studied how different cell types use the same genome to actualize distinct cell states. While MIT was a great training environment for this important problem, she was left curious to understand human disease and set off for medical school at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Missing research, she used her free time to work in the lab of Dr. Steve Baylin and dived deep into cancer epigenetics- trying to understand how misregulation of DNA methylation can impact tumor cells.
Following a residency in Anatomic Pathology and fellowship in Gynecologic Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital, she joined the lab of Dr. Bradley Bernstein’s lab to make sense of the nuclear changes she saw in tumor histology. She generated the first whole-genome topological maps in primary tumors and showed that large-scale shifts in chromatin organization in tumors are closely related to DNA hypomethylation. Surprisingly, these changes are not just present in tumors but also aging cells and impact transcriptional programs that repress tumor growth and invasion. These foundational data leave many exciting questions unanswered and form the foundation for her laboratory. Dr. Johnstone joined the Dana Farber Cancer Institute Department of Oncologic Pathology in 2021 and is also a surgical pathologist in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Women's and Perinatal Pathology group.
Disclosure information not submitted.
DNA Hypomethylation Restrains Malignant Progression
Saturday, November 18, 2023
8:15 AM - 9:15 AM MST