Cancer cells require the proteins encoded by certain genes in order to proliferate. These ?genetic dependencies? are promising targets for therapeutic intervention, as drugs that block the function of a dependency can induce apoptosis and durable tumor regression. The discovery and characterization of genetic dependencies and the drugs that can inhibit them are key goals of preclinical cancer research. My laboratory has investigated multiple putative genetic dependencies using CRISPR/Cas9 mutagenesis. We have found that verified mutagenesis of many cancer drug targets fails to recapitulate published results obtained when these genes were knocked down with RNAi. Moreover, we find that multiple ?targeted inhibitors? currently in clinical trials continue to kill cancer cells harboring CRISPR-induced null mutations in their reported targets, demonstrating pervasive off-target cell killing among clinical inhibitors. These results ? coupled with the observation that 97% of drug-indication pairs that enter clinical trials in oncology fail to receive FDA approval - suggest the existence of fundamental shortcomings in how cancer genetic dependencies are identified and studied. In this work, we will develop a robust, preclinical target validation pipeline to characterize both the consequences of loss-of-function alterations in potential drug targets and to validate on-target activity of putative clinical inhibitors. In particular, we will select genes that are reported to be cancer dependencies and that are targeted by small-molecule inhibitors, and we will study the cellular consequences of their deletion or inhibition (Aim 1). Next, we will use cells harboring CRISPR-induced knockouts of these putative drug targets to investigate the chemical inhibitors that had been used to target them (Aim 2). If these reagents continue to kill cells that totally lack their reported targets, then this would indicate that they induce cell death through an off-target mechanism. Then, we will deploy both spontaneous- and CRISPR-directed mutagenesis in order to generate mutations that confer resistance to these small-molecule inhibitors, thereby helping to identify their true cellular targets (Aim 3). Finally, by isolating drug-resistance mutations, we have discovered that one mischaracterized anti-cancer drug is in fact the first potent and specific inhibitor of the CDK11B kinase to be described. Using this knowledge, we will seek to identify biomarkers that can predict therapeutic responses to this drug (Aim 4). In total, these experiments will delineate a robust preclinical pipeline for target validation, shed light on the genetic architecture that underlies cancer-essential genes, and allow drug re-purposing studies of multiple clinical inhibitors by uncovering their true targets.
The vast majority of new cancer drugs fail to significantly help the patients who try them. We believe that this is in part because the targets of these drugs have not been determined correctly. We will use a set of genetic techniques to discover the real targets of several different cancer drugs, which may help clinicians identify which patients would be most likely to benefit from receiving them.
