The J. Michael Bishop Institute of Cancer Research
Identifying the constraints that govern malignant persistence.
Cancer remains difficult to stop not because its molecular landscape is uncharted, but because durable control often fails even when precise interventions achieve their intended molecular effects. This decoupling between target engagement and persistent disease points to a deeper limitation: malignant systems can remain executable despite effective inhibition of conventional signaling targets.
The J. Michael Bishop Institute of Cancer Research (JMBI) was established to address this limitation. The Institute studies the conditions under which malignant systems remain executable, and the determinants that define the boundary beyond which execution can no longer be sustained under perturbation.
JMBI approaches cancer not as a collection of individual targets to be controlled, but as an architecture whose persistence is governed by feasibility, and whose collapse occurs only when constraints are exceeded.
