Imagine your doctor says to you. "You have less than three months to live."
It's terrifying right? It's actually one of
the conversations that you would never
even want to think about.
But unfortunately this is exactly what
pancreatic cancer patients have to
experience. Pancreatic cancer is one of
the deadliest diseases that is predicted
to cause more than 110,000 deaths by
2025 in the EU. Pancreatic cancer doesn't have major signs and symptoms at an
early stage which is why the disease is
ignored and when it is detected it's
just too late.
Currently only 7% of people diagnosed
with pancreatic cancer go on to live for
a further five years. Research has shown
that one of the causes of pancreatic
cancer is due to alterations in the
proteins that are involved in repairing
damaged DNA. Every day our DNA's are
damaged thousands of times as they
divide. But luckily these damaged DNA's
are repaired by a special protein called
the ataxia telangiectasia mutated protein.
For short the ATM protein. The
ATM is regulated by an ATM interactive
protein also known as ATMIN. So, when a
DNA damage happens the ATMIN protein
moves towards the DNA damage site which then recruits the ATM. The ATM and ATMIN
interaction activates DNA repair. So in
my project I have detected normal and
high levels of faulty ATMIN proteins in
pancreatic cancer cells. As you can see
from this diagram the faulty ATMIN proteins cannot activate DNA repair when
DNA damage happens. This leads to
uncontrolled cell division followed by
cancer formation. So to fix this problem
the faulty ATMIN protein needs to be
inhibited in order to allow the normal
ATMIN proteins to repair the DNA properly.
In order to do this I'm using a
special gene editing technique to knock
out ATMIN proteins from the pancreatic
cancer cells. These ATMIN proteins are
then analysed under various conditions.
This will help to develop ATMIN
inhibitors that will specifically target
and inhibit faulty ATMIN proteins in
the pancreatic cancer cells which will
eventually lead to cancer cell death.
This project is still at an early stage
but it has a great potential in generating
new cancer treatments especially for late stage pancreatic cancer.
Thank you very much.
