Andrey Parkhitko, PhD

Summary

My current cancer-related research is focused on i) RB1 tumor suppressor and ii) nutrient interventions that may suppress tumor growth.

RB1 is a tumor suppressor gene that is inactivated in a significant proportion of all cancer cases. A therapeutic approach that specifically targets defects in this tumor suppressor is currently not available. A synthetic lethal (SL) interaction occurs between two genes when the inactivation of either gene alone is viable but the inactivation of both genes simultaneously results in the loss of viability. My lab uses a cross-species approach to identify evolutionarily conserved SL targets for RB1-deficient cells. Our focus is to translate our findings from Drosophila screening and from bioinformatics analysis of human cancer cell lines and human cancer patients into appropriate mouse cancer models and ultimately in a clinical trial in human cancer patients.