Project 462070

Understanding the root causes of breast cancer is essential to improve its therapy. Despite advances made in the past decades in identifying mechanisms that drive breast cancer development, there is an urgent need to discover novel therapies tailored for breast cancer patients. We are helping to address this gap with an "Achilles Heel" approach to identify new genetic targets to kill breast tumors. RNF168 and RNF169 are closely related genes. We have made a discovery that these genes have opposing effects on breast cancer. While RNF168 protects from specific breast cancer types, RNF69 defects promotes breast cancer development. Furthermore, we identified that these two genes have different effects on biological processes that are frequently deregulated in breast cancer. Notably, we discovered that RNF168 is an "Achilles Heel" for breast cancer associated with defective RNF169. We plan to build on these discoveries to characterize the novel biological functions of these two genes, and identify novel targets to kill breast tumors associated with defective RNF169.