Every day, the DNA in each of our cells suffers thousands of attacks. Air pollution, cigarette smoke, background radiation, and even routine cell division can damage the genetic code that keeps us alive. Fortunately, our cells are equipped with sophisticated repair machinery, a suite of enzymes that detect and fix DNA damage before it leads to mutations or cell death.
But this protective system can go awry. Some of the most important cancer therapies work by damaging DNA. Cancer cells will therefore hijack DNA repair machinery to fix the therapy-induced damage and resist frontline treatments. Developing innovative tools to understand exactly how cancer cells exploit DNA repair and how to turn that knowledge into better treatments is the focus of work underway by biochemist Daniel Laverty.
Laverty is a new addition to the chemistry department, and his research creates functional assays, molecular tools that measure specific DNA repair pathways in living cells. These assays address a fundamental challenge in cancer research. DNA can be damaged in myriad ways, making it difficult to pinpoint which repair pathways are most important in any given tumor.
"If you just treat cells with radiation, you're actually making 100 different types of DNA damage," says Laverty, assistant professor of chemistry. "So then it becomes really challenging. Let's say you have one tumor that was killed by radiation and one that was resistant. Which one of those 100 DNA lesions killed this tumor, but not that tumor?"
Spotlight Recipient
Daniel Laverty
Assistant Professor of Biochemistry