Grant: Project Grant

There are few effective therapies for colorectal cancer so there is a need to identify new targets that are appropriate for therapeutic intervention. The Hippo pathway, named for an unusual phenotype in flies, is a key regulator of cell proliferation and organ size and is dysregulated in virtually all human cancers. We employed diverse, high-throughput robotics approaches to understand how the Hippo pathway is controlled and discovered new genes that act to turn off Hippo signaling. We showed that if we block one of these genes, we can prevent the tumorigenic properties of colorectal cancer cell lines. Thus, the studies we propose here are aimed at understanding how this and other identified genes work, to study their role in tumor formation in mice and to develop drugs that will block these proteins. We hope that our findings will provide an opportunity to define new ways to block the progression of cancer.