Judith Gasson, Ph.D., became the director of UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center on Sept. 15, 1995. She is a molecular biologist and is responsible for one of only 39 institutions designated as comprehensive cancer centers by the National Cancer Institute.

Gasson earned her doctorate 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 the 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 immediately a satisfactory white cell count. This procedure would lead to greater patient comfort, reduce the chance of infection, and permit the administration of more cancer-killing chemotherapy.

Besides developing a way to grow blood cells in the lab, Gasson, a full professor at the UCLA School of Medicine and head of a 10-person laboratory at the JCCC, is concentrating on factors that make leukemia cells grow. Learning the steps cells take in becoming leukemic could lead to finding ways to interrupt those steps, thereby eliminating the leukemic cells.