Thomas Clarke, Ph.D
Assistant Professor, Pathology & Laboratory Medicine
Biography
Dr. Clarke studied Medical Science at the University of Exeter in the UK, which included a twelve-month research internship at Harvard Medical School. He then pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Birmingham in the laboratory of Dr. Clare Davies, working on understanding the importance of the arginine methyltransferase enzyme, PRMT5, in the DNA damage response (Clarke et al, Molecular Cell; 2017).
After his Ph.D., Dr. Clarke was awarded an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship and joined the laboratory of Dr. Johnathan Whetstine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he worked on elucidating the importance of chromatin dynamics and histone modifications for the regulation of extra chromosomal DNA amplifications (Clarke et al, Cancer Discovery; 2020). After the completion of his EMBO fellowship, Dr. Clarke joined the laboratory of Dr. Raul Mostoslavsky, Scientific Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, to bridge his interests in chromatin dynamics, DNA damage repair and genome stability maintenance. Funded by fellowships from the Charles King Trust and Massachusetts General Hospital Fund for Medical Discovery, Dr. Clarke has been working to identify and characterize novel chromatin factors involved in DNA damage repair, linking these factors to the pathology of several cancers and human developmental syndromes (Clarke et al, in revision).
In the summer of 2022, Dr. Clarke became a junior faculty member at Harvard Medical School and The Massachusetts General Hospital Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research. In January 2024, funded by a National Institutes of Health K99/R00 career development award, Dr. Clarke joined the faculty at Boston University School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor to start his independent research laboratory.
Publications
- Published on 7/28/2022
Clarke TL, Mostoslavsky R. DNA repair as a shared hallmark in cancer and ageing. Mol Oncol. 2022 Sep; 16(18):3352-3379. PMID: 35834102.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 12/28/2021
Martinez-Pastor B, Silveira GG, Clarke TL, Chung D, Gu Y, Cosentino C, Davidow LS, Mata G, Hassanieh S, Salsman J, Ciccia A, Bae N, Bedford MT, Megias D, Rubin LL, Efeyan A, Dellaire G, Mostoslavsky R. Assessing kinetics and recruitment of DNA repair factors using high content screens. Cell Rep. 2021 Dec 28; 37(13):110176. PMID: 34965416.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 9/3/2020
Clarke TL, Mostoslavsky R. Resveratrol: Friend or Foe? Mol Cell. 2020 Sep 03; 79(5):705-707. PMID: 32888435.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 4/13/2020
Edwards MJ, White GF, Butt JN, Richardson DJ, Clarke TA. The Crystal Structure of a Biological Insulated Transmembrane Molecular Wire. Cell. 2020 Apr 30; 181(3):665-673.e10. PMID: 32289252.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 11/27/2019
Clarke TL, Tang R, Chakraborty D, Van Rechem C, Ji F, Mishra S, Ma A, Kaniskan HÜ, Jin J, Lawrence MS, Sadreyev RI, Whetstine JR. Histone Lysine Methylation Dynamics Control EGFR DNA Copy-Number Amplification. Cancer Discov. 2020 Feb; 10(2):306-325. PMID: 31776131.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 7/26/2018
Mishra S, Van Rechem C, Pal S, Clarke TL, Chakraborty D, Mahan SD, Black JC, Murphy SE, Lawrence MS, Daniels DL, Whetstine JR. Cross-talk between Lysine-Modifying Enzymes Controls Site-Specific DNA Amplifications. Cell. 2018 Aug 09; 174(4):803-817.e16. PMID: 30057114.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 12/19/2017
Chiang K, Zielinska AE, Shaaban AM, Sanchez-Bailon MP, Jarrold J, Clarke TL, Zhang J, Francis A, Jones LJ, Smith S, Barbash O, Guccione E, Farnie G, Smalley MJ, Davies CC. PRMT5 Is a Critical Regulator of Breast Cancer Stem Cell Function via Histone Methylation and FOXP1 Expression. Cell Rep. 2017 Dec 19; 21(12):3498-3513. PMID: 29262329.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 5/1/2017
Clarke TL, White DA, Osborne ME, Shaw AM, Smart NJ, Daniels IR. Predicting response to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy in locally advanced rectal cancer with serum biomarkers. Ann R Coll Surg Engl. 2017 May; 99(5):373-377. PMID: 28462648.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 2/23/2017
Clarke TL, Sanchez-Bailon MP, Chiang K, Reynolds JJ, Herrero-Ruiz J, Bandeiras TM, Matias PM, Maslen SL, Skehel JM, Stewart GS, Davies CC. PRMT5-Dependent Methylation of the TIP60 Coactivator RUVBL1 Is a Key Regulator of Homologous Recombination. Mol Cell. 2017 Mar 02; 65(5):900-916.e7. PMID: 28238654.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 8/29/2015
Carneiro DG, Clarke T, Davies CC, Bailey D. Identifying novel protein interactions: Proteomic methods, optimisation approaches and data analysis pipelines. Methods. 2016 Feb 15; 95:46-54. PMID: 26320829.
Read at: PubMed
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