Grant: Project Grant

Breast cancer is a complex disease having a major impact on society across the world. In particular, patients diagnosed with certain types of aggressive breast cancer subtypes not only have limited therapies but also a prospect of early recurrence of the cancer, high propensity for metastasis leading to poor patient outcome and shorter time to death. To develop new and more effective therapies against these aggressive breast cancers we need to understand more the biology of these tumors. This information will help us develop reagents to target and stop these tumorigenic mechanisms thereby generating new therapies against these aggressive breast cancer subtypes offering better patient care. Recently we have discovered a highly aggressive tumorigenic pathway "CPSF6/A-to-I RNA cascade" uniquely in aggressive breast cancer subtypes and when we tested ways to abrogate this pathway importantly this led to suppression of tumorigenesis and tumor cell survival. Therefore, the project described here is to test the usefulness of available small molecules that can stop this pathway and test their efficacy to suppress tumorigenesis using highly sophisticated state-of-art cell biology and preclinical models representing the aggressive subtypes of breast cancer. If successful, we will generate a proof of concept that this pathway can be stopped therapeutically and present a new treatment modality for patients affected by these aggressive subtypes of breast cancer.