Janet Sawicki, PhD
Lankenau Institute for Medical Research
Utilizing HuR to Combat Chemotherapeutic Resistance in Ovarian Cancer
The molecular basis underlying the range of ovarian cancer patient responses to chemotherapeutic agents is poorly understood. This project will address the urgent need to stratify ovarian cancer patients for therapy and enhance currently available treatment strategies. Recently, Dr. Sawicki’s lab discovered that the stress response protein, HuR, can mediate therapeutic efficacy of gemcitabine and a PARP inhibitor, two drugs currently used to treat ovarian cancer, by rapidly binding and regulating cancer-associated mRNA transcripts. Therefore, HuR may serve as both a potential predictive marker for drug efficacy and a promising target for therapeutic manipulation for the treatment of epithelial ovarian cancer.