Tackling Metastatic Cancer: From Systems Biology to Therapeutics

Abstract

Most cancer associated deaths are due to metastasis, the process in which a primary tumor migrates into neighboring tissues and forms secondary metastases. This project is split into two related parts, systems biology and treatment design for metastatic cancer. Systems biology approaches to cancer require large biological data sets, such as genomic and transcriptomic profiling of tumors. Previous data gathering efforts such as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) have mainly consisted of primary tumor samples, which makes the metastatic process still poorly characterized to this date. Although a recent study by Robinson et al. have performed RNA-seq on a wide array of metastases, coined the MET500 cohort. Differential gene expression analysis between primary TCGA tumor samples and metastatic MET500 tumor samples revealed a potential mechanism for colonization of a secondary site, by utilizing the Mesenchymal-Epithelial Transition (MET). The treatment design part of this project sought to implement a novel CRISPR-Cas13 base editing treatment against a recently characterized mechanism for breast cancer metastasis.