DNA repair processes as markers for personalized cancer therapies

Speaker: Dr. Pawel Zawadzki, Division of Molecular Biophysics, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan, Poland

Talk: DNA repair processes as markers for personalized cancer therapies.

Time: 17th May 2019, 9:00 am

Venue: Intercollegiate Faculty of Biotechnology, Abrahama 58, hall 042

Personalized medicine is an approach to improve treatment of an individual patient by taking into account specific changes in individual’s DNA. One aspect of this is an assessment of DNA repair mechanisms to tailor cancer treatment based on patient genomic profiles. Thus, evaluation of the efficiency of DNA repair provides a unique opportunity to apply targeted cancer therapies. We work on identifying DNA repair pathways involved in cell chemosensitivity by RNAi knockdown screening. We tested RNAi library for genes involved in different DNA repair pathways using the hTERT RPE-1 cell line. Silencing RNA interference (RNAi) of the target DNA repair gene was followed with various drug treatments to identify repair pathway-specific chemosensitivity. For example, we observed that silencing of Nucleotide Excision Repair but not Mismatch Repair drastically increase the sensitivity of the cells to popular chemotherapeutic – cisplatin. In conclusion, poor effectiveness of some repair pathways increase susceptibility to cisplatin. Obtaining this information for individual tumor can potentially help select most effective treatment for patients. We suggest that the comprehensive analysis of DNA repair pathways efficiencies, preferably achieved by cancer whole-genome sequencing could provide a diagnostic tool and should soon be applied in the day-to-day cancer diagnostics.