Dr. Thomas Graeber's group is working to understand cancer signaling from a systems viewpoint. They focus on developing genome- and proteome-wide detection assays, applying these assays to measuring and computationally modeling aberrant cancer signaling and translating their discoveries to clinical applications. They have developed a mass-spectrometry based protocol for identifying tyrosine-phosphorylated proteins from cancer cell lysates. They are using this proteome-wide "phosphorylation profiling" assay to identify the signaling pathways activated by various oncogenic initiating events (e.g., kinase mutations), and to elucidate the interconnectedness of classical signaling pathways into a more comprehensive signaling network. In modeling cancer signaling, one of their goals is to identify minimal sets of informative components that best reflect the state of the cell and serve as molecular targets for diagnostics, imaging and patient tailored treatment. As with all of systems biology, their research relies on an interdisciplinary approach that combines biology, chemistry, mathematics and computation.