US Department of Defense grant backs far-reaching breast cancer study
Almost one in eight women will get breast cancer in their lifetime, but what puts them at risk of this genetically and distinguishes them from women who don’t get the disease is unclear.
An ambitious study by Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute’s (BDI) Associate Professor Joseph Rosenbluh aims to pinpoint the breast cancer risk genes involved and eventually match them to treatments.
Associate Professor Rosenbluh has been funded by an AUD$1.3 million US Department of Defense grant to conduct the study.
He is collaborating with Professor Georgia Chenevix-Trench from the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, analysing Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) data. Professor Chenevix-Trench’s team collected DNA from 100,000 women who had breast cancer and 100,000 who didn’t and identified variations in the DNA sequence that is associated with increased breast cancer risk.
Associate Professor Rosenbluh, who heads the Cancer Functional Genomics lab at the Monash BDI, is using CRISPR-based screenings to systematically examine these DNA regions and to reveal the specific genes behind the increased risk of cancer.
“Using CRISPR-based libraries we can put genes in different models – both animal and human cancer models in vitro – and suppress or over-express them,” Associate Professor Rosenbluh said.
“Then we can identify drugs, new and existing, that can match them,” he said.
“This project is ambitious in that we’re trying to take this whole field of GWAS to the next level – not only of understanding changes to genes but functionalising it.”
Associate Professor Rosenbluh said securing the Department of Defense grant had been difficult and was excited that it would further this work.
“It’s an endorsement of our work and the whole field,” he said.
“This whole premise of being able to develop ways of taking GWAS forward is creating a lot of excitement.”
The project, entitled Systemic identification, validation and evaluation of breast cancer risk genes through follow up of genome-wide association studies will take effect from 1 Feb 2019 and run for three years.