Alan Cantor, M.D., Ph.D.

Alan Cantor aims to understand the gene regulatory mechanisms involved in normal blood cell development, and to understand how their dysregulation leads to human blood disorders.

The Cantor lab is focused on further elucidating the transcriptional mechanisms that regulate normal hematopoiesis and how they are perturbed in certain leukemia predisposition disorders. Cantor and his colleagues are specifically interested in hematopoietic stem cells, the megakaryocyte lineage and the role of GATA, RUNX and ETS family transcription factors.   Recent work has also focused on the bone marrow microenvironment.

The Cantor laboratory takes a number of approaches to these studies:

1. proteomic techniques to isolate and characterize multiprotein complexes involving these transcription factors;
2. chromatin immunoprecipitation coupled to high throughput DNA sequencing (CUT&RUN) to identify sites occupied by these transcription factors across the genome;
3. gene targeting in mice;
4. gene/base editing in primary human CD34+-derived cells;
5. RNA editing;
6. human genetic analysis of families with inherited thromboctyopenias and predisposition to leukemia;
7. spatial transcriptomics of the bone marrow and other hematopoietic tissues.

Alan Cantor is former Deputy Chief of the Division of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Boston Children's Hospital and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He is a graduate of Washington University Medical School. He completed an internship and residency at St. Louis Children's Hospital, and a postgraduate fellowship at Boston Children's Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.