Judith Gasson, Ph.D., became the director of UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center (JCCC) on Sept. 15, 1995. She is a molecular biologist and is responsible for one of only 40 institutions designated as comprehensive cancer centers by the National Cancer Institute.

Gasson earned her doctorate degree in physiology at the University of Colorado in 1979. She did her postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA, studying glucocorticoid hormones, which are made by the adrenal gland in response to stress. In 1983, she left the Salk Institute to join JCCC.

Gasson was instrumental in purifying for the first time a hormone-like substance that increases the speed of bone marrow cell reproduction. That substance, called GM-CSF, is used to help prevent infections in cancer patients and to allow those patients to tolerate more chemotherapy and radiation than had previously been possible.

Studies currently underway in Gasson's lab aim to eliminate the two-week recovery time by multiplying a patient's blood cells in the laboratory and then reinfusing sufficient cells in the patient to produce a satisfactory white cell count. This procedure would result in greater patient comfort, reduce the chances of infection and permit the administration of more cancer-killing chemotherapy.

Gasson is a professor with the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and directs a 10-person laboratory at JCCC. Her research also is focused on factors that make leukemia cells grow. Discovering the steps that lead to a healthy cell becoming a leukemia cell could result in new therapies that target one or more of these steps, thereby eliminating the cancer.