John M. Lamar

John Lamar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Albany Medical College. He received his undergraduate degree from The State University of New York at Geneseo and a Ph.D. from Albany Medical College. He did his a postdoctoral work at the Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he focused on understanding molecular mechanisms that govern breast cancer and melanoma metastasis.

Dr. Lamar established his lab at Albany Medical College in October of 2015 and his work remains focused on identifying regulators of breast cancer and melanoma metastasis. His lab has developed a number of in vivo approaches to identify and study genes that influence metastasis formation and metastatic growth, and his team is using these approaches to investigate the roles of the transcriptional co-activators YAP and TAZ in metastasis. This work builds off of Dr. Lamar’s postdoctoral work, which demonstrated that inappropriately high YAP transcriptional activity promotes breast cancer and melanoma metastasis. Current projects are focused on identifying pathways in cancer cells that are essential for YAP/TAZ-mediated tumor progression and metastasis. The lab also studies a rare vascular sarcoma called epithelioid hemangioendothelioma (EHE). This rare tumor is driven by a chromosomal translocation that fuses part of the TAZ protein with the CAMTA1 protein. Dr. Lamar and his group aim to identify pathways that can be exploited to repress the activity of this fusion protein and potentially treat EHE.