I study hedgehog signal transduction for two main reasons:

1.Biochemical steps in the pathway are not understood. Biochemical activities of the components are not known. As a consequence, we don’t know how the Smo inhibitors work– how will we deal with resistance?

2.No tools to assay activity in patient samples.

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One of the major breakthroughs in the field has been the finding that Hh signaling is dependant on a very specialized structure called the primary cilium..

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