Elizabeth Murchison Biography

Elizabeth Murchison grew up in Tasmania the island home of the small aggressive marsupial known as the Tasmanian devil. In the mid-'90s the devils were beset with a terrible new disease -- a contagious facial cancer spread by biting that killed the animals just as they reached breeding age. By 2008 half the devil population of Australia had contracted the cancer and died. And as Murchison says: I didn’t want to sit back and let the devils disappear.”
Leading an international team at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory she worked to understand why this cancer was so virulent -- with the goal of saving the Taz as it is called but also of understanding how a contagious cancer works. Analyzing gene and microRNA activity in 25 different facial tumors and in healthy tissue the team found that cancers from animals across Tasmania were identical and that the cancer stems from Schwann cells which normally insulate nerve fibers.
Now a Research Fellow in Medical Sciences at King's College Cambridge Murchison is using high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies to investigate the genetics and evolution of this disease one of only three known cancers that spread contagiously.

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