Motoki Takaku, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Project: Discover epigenetic vulnerabilities of aggressive breast cancer
Mentor: Motoki Takaku, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Location: Department of Biomedical Sciences, Columbia Hall
Description: Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in the US and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths. GATA3 is a reliable biomarker for breast carcinomas and is frequently used to determine the tissue of origin to confirm a diagnosis. GATA3 is a special class of transcription factors that are capable of inducing cell-fate transition. For instance, GATA3 can induce mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition in breast cancer cells and iPSCs from fibroblasts. Recent large-scale genomic profiling of breast carcinomas identified frequent mutations in GATA3 and these mutations have been considered as breast cancer "drivers", yet the functional consequences of GATA3 mutations in breast cancer are underexplored. We recently generated GATA3 mutant breast cancer cell lines and identified that GATA3 mutations can reprogram gene expression and induce more aggressive breast cancer phenotypes. We have also discovered a compound that specifically targets GATA3 mutant luminal breast cancer cells. We are currently trying to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying such therapeutic vulnerabilities in GATA3 mutant breast cancer cells. REU students will have opportunities to learn cell culture, gene expression analysis (qPCR, RNA-seq), and many other chromatin biology techniques (ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, CUT&RUN, etc), including bioinformatics.
