Cancer and the Cell Cycle: From Molecular Pictures To Innovative Therapies

Cancer cells invariably have defects in the proteins that control when cells grow and divide, a process known as cell cycle regulation.   While much effort has gone into developing therapeutics that try to counter a deregulated cell cycle in cancer cells, few drugs have made it to the clinic, as they suffer from toxicity and poor long-term outcomes.  A better understanding of cell cycle regulatory proteins will lead to safer and more effective interventions for cancer.  We are using tools to visualize these proteins and to determine their shape with atomic resolution.  These structures can then be used to understand protein function and how function may be manipulated with chemotherapies. I will describe our recent progress in understanding the structure of the retinoblastoma protein and how we are using the structure towards developing a new therapy for breast cancer.

Speaker: Dr. Seth Rubin, UC Santa Cruz