On June 29, the research group of Professor Teng Fei from the Institute of Biotechnology, College of Life and Health Sciences in NEU published a research thesis titled “CRISPR screens reveal convergent targeting strategies against evolutionarily distinct chemoresistance in cancer” online in the international authoritative academic journal Nature Communications. NEU is the signature unit of the first author of this thesis, Doctoral Candidate Chunge Zhong of College of Life and Sciences in NEU, and Wenjie Jiang from Peking University are the co-first authors, and Professor Teng Fei of NEU, Professor Jun Huang of the Sixth Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University and Professor Huajun Wu of Peking University are the co-corresponding authors.
Tumor chemoresistance is a common problem encountered in clinical practice of tumor diagnosis and treatment, which seriously affects the prognosis of patients and clinical treatment effects. At present, there is no systematic solution. Although there is evidence that multiple genes are involved in chemoresistance, people’s understanding of this phenomenon is still incomplete, and there is still a lack of effective therapeutic strategies to overcome chemoresistance. Therefore, it is urgent to systematically and comprehensively study the molecular basis of various chemoresistance. The emergence of high-throughput genetic screening system based on CRISPR technology provides a potential effective tool to explore this problem.
Through 30 sets of genome-wide CRISPR gene knockout screens and 26 sets of drug-gene library screens, this study systematically identified the chemoresistance-related genes of various tumor cells to 7 common chemotherapeutic drugs (oxaliplatin, irinotecan, 5-fluorouracil, doxorubicin, cisplatin, docetaxel and paclitaxel), revealed the global law and molecular basis of tumor chemoresistance, and proposed potential treatment strategies against drug resistance. The multiple CRISPR screening methodology used in this study can also provide some reference for the research of similar problems.
This research work has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and other projects, as well as the public instrument platform of the Institute of Biotechnology, the experimental technology center and the life medicine laboratory of the College of Life and Sciences. In addition, Professor Lijun Liu, Researcher Yihao Li, Professor Ren Sheng, Professor Dake Xu, Professor Yue Hou and Professor Xueying Yang also provided strong support and help to this work.
