Functional genomic approaches to breast cancer

Excerpt

One of the major remaining deficits in our understanding of the human genome is that information regarding gene function is available for only one-quarter of the approximately 30,000 genes. Many of these hitherto anonymous genes are potential targets for the development of new anti-cancer drugs. It is therefore important to functionally annotate the tens of thousands of genes for which this information is currently lacking. My laboratory has developed functional genetic approaches to obtain information regarding gene function using high-throughput screens in mammalian cells. We have developed both gain-of-function genetic screens (using retroviral cDNA expression libraries) and loss-of-function genetic screens (using vector-based RNA interference libraries) to carry out large-scale genetic screens in mammalian cells. We focus on the central growth-regulatory pathways that are most frequently deregulated in cancer. …