Research from the lab of Sharon Cantor, PhD, professor of molecular, cell & cancer biology, upends the conventional model of how chemotherapy works. In particular, she provides a new understanding of a PARP inhibitor (PARPi), a chemotherapy drug commonly used against breast and ovarian cancer. It is conventionally thought that hereditary breast and ovarian cancers are vulnerable to drugs that cut the tumor DNA in half. Indeed, cancer cells mutated for the hereditary breast and ovarian cancer genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, are both defective in repairing broken DNA and are sensitive to the PARPi drug. The effectiveness of PARPi against cancer cells with mutations in the BRCA genes led researchers to try the PARPi treatment on other cancers with defects in DNA repair, hoping for similar positive results.
