Andrea Ventura , Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA

Decoding the cancer genome: the CRISPR-revolution
The widespread use of high-throughput genomic methods is profoundly changing the way we understand, classify, and treat cancers, and provides unprecedented opportunities to design therapeutic approaches tailored to individual patients. The success of these efforts is contingent on our ability to identify, among the hundreds of different genetic lesions, those that actively drive tumorigenesis. The recent development of powerful genome editing methods promises to greatly sped up this process and allows, for the first time, to model a wide range of preciously unaccessible cancer associated mutations. I will discuss how CRISPR-based gene editing methods are revolutionizing cancer. I will also show how my group is combining computational methods and in vivo somatic genome editing approaches to generate and characterize novel mouse models of human cancers and to explore the non-coding fraction of the cancer genome.

Bibliography

Rapid and efficient one-step generation of paired gRNA CRISPR-Cas9 libraries. Nat Commun., 2015

The biological functions of miRNAs: lessons from in vivo studies. Trends Cell Biol., 2015

In vivo engineering of oncogenic chromosomal rearrangements with the CRISPR/Cas9 system. Nature, 2014