Samuel W. Brady Lab

The team also uses mutational signatures to understand how existing therapies may induce secondary cancers in survivors later in life. Many pediatric cancer survivors will undergo treatment and be cured of their initial cancer but then develop a second cancer due to their prior therapy. Our lab uses mutational signatures and other genomic techniques to understand how therapy can induce specific mutations that initiate second cancers. The results of this work could help inform which therapies should be reduced to a lower dosage and which should be avoided entirely in certain patient populations. Therapy-induced mutational signatures can also fuel tumor heterogeneity and drug resistance. Thus, they may help identify approaches to sequence therapies so that highly mutagenic therapies are avoided during certain phases of therapy when drug resistance is more likely to develop.

Finally, we aim to tackle new therapeutic targets using existing or new therapies. Many current cancer therapies are toxic, which is a significant problem for pediatric patients because their bodies are still developing. In order to develop treatments that will have the maximum impact on cancer cells with minimal impact on healthy tissue, the team is working to identify the genes that are unnecessary for human survival but vital to a cancer cell’s survival. This research will allow the identification of existing drugs that can target the function of these genes or the development of new therapies to target specific proteins and minimize treatment toxicity.