Identification and Characterization of Novel Drug Targets for Personalized Breast Cancer Nanomedicine

Personalized cancer nanomedicine aims at the design of novel nanodrugs that would match the molecular fingerprint of an individual patient`s tumor. Expression profiling and next generation-sequencing data represent rich resources for discovering new starting points for such approaches. Here, we selected a set of 140 genes, which have been proposed to show potentially relevant alterations in breast cancer by genome-wide next-generation sequencing. We constructed a panel of isogenic breast cancer cell lines and systematically analyzed the normal and the mutant gene variants for their effects on breast cancer cells.
After completing about half of the primary screen, several novel growth modulators for breast cancer were identified. To this end, we will present data on detailed follow-up analyses of two of these novel genes, which represent novel breast cancer tumor suppressors. At least one of these may provide starting points for the consecutive design of synthetic lethal screens for personalized nanodrugs.