Maxim Frolov, PhD

Maxim Frolov, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Illinois College Medicine Chicago. He joined UIC in 2004. His laboratory uses genetic, biochemical and genomic approaches to gain insights into mechanisms that control cell proliferation and differentiation during animal development with the focus on the Retinoblastoma (RB) pathway. Toward this goal, they take full advantage of the Drosophila genetic model system, which has a streamlined version of the RB pathway. He has worked on the RB pathway since 1999 and has made several contributions to the field using the fly model. Among them are the finding that E2F regulation is a net result of interplay between an activator and a repressor E2Fs, linking the RB pathway to metabolic regulation, pinpointing essential functions of RB during development, use of state of the art single cell genomics to profile mutations in RB pathway, demonstrating functional interaction between intronic microRNAs and the host genes they are embedded into.