Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto shared on LinkedIn:
“Scientists just cracked one of breast cancer‘s biggest mysteries. Researchers from Sinai Health and the University of Toronto untangled the ‘chromosome chaos’ behind basal-like (triple-negative) breast cancer, uncovering 81 previously hidden genes that could help explain what drives one of the hardest-to-treat forms of the disease.
Published in Nature, the study was led by Daniel Schramek, senior investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health-and a professor of molecular genetics at Temerty Med, alongside Khalid Al-Zahrani, assistant professor of molecular genetics at Temerty Med and a principal investigator at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto.
Using a first-of-its-kind gene-editing tool developed by the team, the researchers were able to map the genetic drivers of this aggressive form of breast cancer, opening new avenues for targeted therapies for patients with few treatment options.
‘This work brought together computational analysis, biotechnology development and functional genomics experiments across a range of mouse and human breast cancer models,’ says Al-Zahrani. ‘Combining all of that enabled us to uncover roles for many genes that we did not know were driving breast cancer and to start thinking about how to tackle BLBC in a targeted way.’