The overall objectives of work in the Cameron lab are to discover the mechanisms cancer cells use to ensure their survival, and to turn these discoveries into better ways to kill cancer cells.  To reach these objectives, we have taken the unconventional approach of using genetic analyses in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to study fundamental aspects of development, particularly including programmed cell death, and then to test whether these pathways are evolutionarily conserved and important for the survival of human cancer cells.  The central hypothesis here is that to ensure their survival human cancer cells usurp pathways used during normal development for the same purpose.