Nancy Andrews is working to develop new treatments for iron deficiency, hemochromatosis, the anemia of chronic disease and other iron diseases. In doing so, she and her colleagues in the Andrews laboratory collaborate with biotechnology companies interested in developing new methods to diagnose and treat those disorders.

Specifically, her lab is investigating the molecular processes governing normal iron balance and how iron balance is perturbed in iron deficiency, hemochromatosis and other iron diseases. The researchers take advantage of strong similarities between human and mouse iron metabolism, and use mouse genetics as a tool to characterize the roles of individual proteins in networks regulating iron transport and iron balance. Many of the mouse mutants that they have developed provide faithful models of human iron disorders. Their approaches include:

• Positional cloning to identify genes mutated in mouse and human iron diseases.
• Targeted mutagenesis to introduce selected mutations into the mouse genome.
• Combinatorial mutagenesis and microarray expression profiling to define epistasis between genes in iron regulatory pathways.
• Identication of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) modifying iron homeostasis and
• Characterizing how iron transporters function and are regulated.

Nancy Andrews received her MD from Harvard Medical School and her PhD from M.I.T. She completed an internship, residency and fellowship at Childrens Hospital Boston/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Dr. Andrews is also the Dean for Basic Sciences and Graduate Studies at Harvard Medical School. She is the recipient of many honors and awards, including the 1998 Samuel Rosenthal Prize for Excellence in Academic Pediatrics, the 2000 American Federation for Medical Research Foundation Outstanding Investigator Award in Basic Science, the 2002 E. Mead Johnson Award from the Society for Pediatric Research and the 2004 Dean's Leadership Award for the Advancement of Women Faculty at Harvard Medical School.