Abstract A71: HDAC6 activity is a non-oncogene addiction hub for in inflammatory breast cancers

Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is the most lethal form of breast cancer (~5% of all breast cancers). Almost all women with primary IBC have lymph node involvement, and at diagnosis approximately 25% have already distant metastases. Remarkably, the 5-year survival rate is only 40%, compared to the 85% survival rate among non-IBC patients. Despite its lethality, IBC remains poorly understood, and is the only breast cancer form for which mortality has continued to increase during the last 20 years. There are no current targeted therapies specific for IBC and systemic disease management relies mainly on chemotherapy.Due to their unique biology the homeostasis of cancer cells present different requirements from non-transformed cells. Importantly, interfering with these requirements has been successfully used as a highly selective and low toxic anticancer strategy. Although some efforts have been made characterizing the molecular fingerprint of IBCs unfortunately, no clinical application has emerged from these studies. Thus, we decided to utilize a different strategy to identify the Achilles' heel of IBC cells. We have pioneered the development of genetic tools as well as experimental and analytical strategies to perform RNAi-based loss-of-function studies at a genome-wide level. Importantly, we and others have demonstrated that these functional screens are able to identify essential functions linked to certain cancer phenotypes. Specifically in breast cancer cells, these studies...
Source: Molecular Cancer Research - Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Tags: Targeted Therapies: Poster Presentations - Proffered Abstracts Source Type: research