Daniel E. Webster, PhD

Dr. Webster [Philip O’Bryan Montgomery, Jr., MD, Fellow] studies Diffuse Large B Cell Lymphoma (DLBCL), an aggressive cancer that hijacks the normal molecular mechanisms acting in immune B cells to drive malignant growth. Many genes have been studied as oncogenes or tumor suppressors in DLBCL, but a class of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) remains largely unexplored for its function in this cancer. LncRNAs, once thought to be non-functional products of junk DNA, are now known to play an essential role in many biological processes. This research will discover oncogenic or tumor suppressive lncRNAs in DLBCL to better understand the disease and uncover potential targets for cancer diagnosis or therapy.