The UC Santa Cruz Kraw Lecture Series presents: Unmasking cancer’s complete genetic code

In this Kraw lecture, Angela Brooks will discuss her work on cancer research.

Current cancer research focuses almost entirely on finding errors—mutations—in DNA. This has given us incredible tools like precision oncology, matching patients with targeted drugs. But cancer cells almost always develop drug resistance, causing treatments to fail and limiting patient survival. An often-overlooked aspect of cancer genes is the messenger RNA, which is copied from DNA, then translated into protein to do the work of the cell. Over 95% of human genes have isoforms, which are different versions of the RNA message created through a process called RNA splicing. These different messages lead to slightly different proteins, and we believe our lack of knowledge of different isoforms is a missing cause of treatment failure.