Geoffrey G. Hicks received his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from the University of Manitoba. His PhD thesis focused on p53 as a tumor suppressor where he studied in the lab of Dr. Michael Mowat at the Manitoba Institute of Cell Biology.  Pursuing his interest in cancer biology, Dr. Hicks held National Cancer Institute of Canada postdoctoral fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.  With Dr. H. Earl Ruley he developed a novel gene trapping technology as a genetic strategy to identify recessive gene in mammalian cells.  This high-throughput sequence-based screen is currently being applied to develop a library of knock-out mutations in mouse embryonic stem cells, and is an international resource provided by Dr. Hicks’ Mammalian Functional Genomics Centre.  Dr. Hicks is a founding member of the International Mouse Mutagenesis Consortium, the International Gene Trap Consortium, the Federation of International Mouse Resources and the International Knock-out Mouse Project.  Most recently, he has established the Canadian Mouse Consortium, which serves to integrate all major Canadian transgenic mouse platforms and services.  Dr. Hicks’ research program focuses on the functional analysis of genetic determinants of cancer and leukemia.  His research team is currently examining the related RNA binding proteins, TLS and EWS, to identify the transforming potential of these genes in acute myelogenous leukemia and Ewing sarcoma, respectively. 

Dr. Geoff Hicks is a Canada Research Chair in Functional Genomics and is the Director of the Mammalian Functional Genomics Centre, a centre in the Manitoba Institute of Cell Biology which is a joint institute between CancerCare Manitoba and the University of Manitoba and the Genetics Modeling Centre in the University of Manitoba. He is currently leading the North American Conditional Mouse Mutagenesis Project (NorCOMM), the Canadian component of The International Knockout Mouse Project. NorCOMM is supported by Genome Prairie with funding of $13.5 million from Genome Canada and other partners. Dr. Hicks and his team are working with other scientists from around the world to create knockout mice lines for each of the approximately 20,000 mouse genes.

Mouse Embryonic Stem Cells: Functional Analysis of Genetic Determinants of Human Disease

NorCOMM (North American Conditional Mouse Mutagenesis project) is a large-scale research initiative to develop and distribute a resource of mouse embryonic stem (ES) cell lines carrying single conditional knockout mutations across the mouse genome. We are creating a publicly accessible library of ES cells suitable for drug discovery, target discovery and validation, and investigating mouse models of human diseases. Development of the knockout mouse resource itself is the major activity using a combination of high throughput random gene trap mutagenesis and systematic high-throughput gene targeting. NorCOMM vectors are designed to generate expression and functional information for the gene targeted in each mutant ES clone. To ensure the widest utility of the NorCOMM mouse knockout resource, we have developed a universal docking site strategy with a tool box of exchangeable cassettes.  This design will ensure that each mutation can be used to create a conditional knockout allele and a variety of functional replacement alleles. Availability of the genetically altered ES cell resource to be generated in this project will significantly impact biomedical disease-focus research programs broadly and thereby increase the rate at which new medical discoveries are moved into health care delivery.