Project description:We aimed to determine carbazole blue's (CB) targets by gene expression microarray. Our results show that CB inhibits the expression of pro-tumorigenic genes that promote unchecked replication and aberrant DNA repair that cancer cells get addicted to survive.
Project description:The major limitations of DNA-targeting chemotherapy drugs include life-threatening toxicity, acquired resistance and occurrence of secondary cancers. Here, we report a small molecule, Carbazole Blue (CB), that binds to DNA and inhibits cancer growth and metastasis by targeting DNA-related processes that tumor cells use but not the normal cells. We show that CB inhibits the expression of pro-tumorigenic genes that promote unchecked replication and aberrant DNA repair that cancer cells get addicted to survive. In contrast to chemotherapy drugs, systemic delivery of CB suppressed breast cancer growth and metastasis with no toxicity in pre-clinical mouse models. Using PDX and ex vivo explants from estrogen receptor (ER) positive, ER mutant and TNBC patients, we further demonstrated that CB effectively blocks therapy-sensitive and therapy-resistant breast cancer growth without affecting normal breast tissue. Our data provide a strong rationale to develop CB as a viable therapeutic for treating breast cancers.
Project description:PARP1 is an abundant nuclear protein that is involved in a number of biological processes linked to cellular stress responses. PARP1 inhibitors (PARPi) are known to kill tumor cells via two mechanisms (PARP1 catalytic inhibition and PARP1 trapping). In this work we discovered a PROTAC degrader of PARP1 -180055, which uncoupled PARP1 trapping and inhibition. Moreover, 180055 has great potential for treating cancers.
Project description:Splicing misregulation, such as the inclusion of previously unknown cryptic exons, is implicated in numerous diseases. Recent methods have increased accurate and efficient detection of such splicing alterations occurring in disease phenotypes. However, the quantification and differential analyses of non-canonical splicing alterations remains focused at a splice event level, thus preventing a complete view of the effects on the downstream transcriptomic landscape. Here, we present a novel and integrated pipeline, SpliCeAT, that (1) detects and quantifies differential non-canonical splicing events from short-read bulk RNA-seq data, (2) augments the canonical transcriptome with novel transcripts containing these non-canonical splicing events, and (3) performs transcript-level differential analysis to identify and quantify aberrant cryptic exon-containing transcripts based on this augmented transcriptome. Using TDP-43, an ALS/FTD-associated RNA-binding protein as an example, we identified and catalogued aberrant splicing events in embryonic mouse brains. The accuracy of our integrated pipeline was further confirmed and validated with long-read isoform sequencing. Furthermore, by comparing neuronal TDP-43 knockouts in mice with a publicly available human dataset with TDP-43 pathology, we identified and validated 4 common genes, namely, Kalrn/KALRN, Poldip3/POLDIP3, Rnf144a/RNF144A, and Unc13a/UNC13A, with cryptic exons. In summary, our integrated pipeline, novel splice events are identified, incorporated and quantified at the transcript level, thereby enabling more complete transcriptome profiling of well-annotated genomes in in the case of pathological splicing misregulation.