Richard Adeyemi, DVM, PhD
2023 Early Career Investigator Grant
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Synthetic Lethality of the Protexin and BRCA Complexes in Ovarian Cancer
Project Summary
Our DNA is constantly exposed to agents that can cause damage to them. In addition whenever cells divide, errors can form. These errors, called mutations, can lead to the changes in the function of critical genes that are necessary for guarding our genomes against further abnormalities, which can lead to cancer. Certain patients inherit mutations in some of these critical genes, predisposing them to cancer. Two particular genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, have been shown to be mutated often in patients with ovarian cancer. What we have recently found is that, because of the important role these genes play in repairing damaged DNA, loss of these critical genes causes these cancers to rely on alternative methods of repairing DNA. These alternative repair methods become really important in these cells compared to normal cells because, unlike normal cells, these cancer cells have inactivated their primary repair methods, making them potentially vulnerable to drugs that can inhibit these backup repair programs. In this work, we aim to understand how these major and minor repair pathways interact with each other. First, we want to understand how DNA abnormalities arise in cells with mutations in these DNA repair genes. We also aim to demonstrate that targeting these backup pathways is a viable means of treating cancers that lack or have mutations in certain genes that are important for repairing DNA.
Bio