Lab Team

The focus of my lab is to elucidate the role of key oncogenic transcription factors in the biology of prostate cancer. One project focuses on the role of the commonly prostate-specific rearranged ETS family members in gene regulation, chromatin 3D architecture and response to taxanes. The other focus of the Rickman Lab is to understand the role and therapeutic potential of N-Myc in driving neuroendocrine prostate cancer (NEPC). NEPC does not respond to hormonal intervention; they frequently metastasize to visceral organs, and carry a poor prognosis with an average survival of less than one year.We discovered significant over-expression and gene amplification of AURKA (encoding Aurora-A) and MYCN in NEPC. More recently, the Rickman Lab lab has generated novel pre-clinical models of N-Myc driven prostate cancer including genetically engineered mice that molecularly and histologically mimic clinical NEPC and that elucidated a novel transcription regulating complex between N-Myc and (Enhancer of Zeste Homolog 2) EZH2 in driving the NEPC phenotype.