Prof. Uri Ben-David, Tel Aviv University (Israel)

Aneuploidy, an imbalanced number of chromosomes or chromosome arms, is a genetic hallmark of cancer cells, yet aneuploidy remains a biological enigma and a missed opportunity for cancer therapy. My lab combines experimental and computational approaches to dissect the basic biology underlying cancer aneuploidy, to track its origins, and to uncover its cellular consequences. By doing so, we strive to expand our understanding of the genetic basis of cancer, and to make aneuploidy a therapeutic target for cancer treatment.

In this seminar, I will discuss 3 major research efforts that are currently ongoing in the lab:

(1) First, I will discuss how the cellular context affects aneuploidy fitness, and describe the contributions of genomic and environmental factors to aneuploidy evolution. I will focus on an unpublished study in which we revealed an important role for a specific recurrent aneuploidy in brain metastasis.

(2) Next, I will discuss our attempts to identify ‘driver genes’ that underlie recurrent aneuploidies. I will focus on a pipeline that we developed for nominating the genes that underlie common chromosome-arm losses across cancer types.

(3) Lastly, I will discuss our efforts to identify aneuploidy-induced cellular vulnerabilities in order to selectively kill aneuploid cancer cells. I will discuss our recent discoveries of novel therapeutically-relevant cellular dependencies of aneuploid cells.