My work for the Summer of 2020

 2020 has been a challenging year. The COVID-19 pandemic has made many things unable to happen, or be executed in new and strange ways. Fortunately for me, Dr. Jason Somarelli found a way to provide me and five other students with a way to learn about cancer. We were instructed to choose a web application in order to either learn about cancer vulnerabilities or to answer a biological question. I decided that I wanted to identify compounds to treat Double Hit Lymphoma (DHL) using the DepMap portal. 

My grandfather was diagnosed with Double Hit Lymphoma when I was in 7th grade, while he survived, he still suffers from the side effects of experimental treatment plans.

DHL is caused by mutations in the MYC and or BCL2/BCL6. It is usually associated with late-stage cancer progression and poor prognosis. But because DHL is a rare subgroup of Lymphoma, there is not yet a standard way for diagnosing and treating it. 

In my research, I learned about the MYC gene and how it is indirectly targeted to treat other MYC related cancers. Using the DepMap Portal, I was able to find compounds that were promising for treating DHL cancers. I was then able to narrow down these compounds to a type that indirectly targeted MYC. These were either BET, CDK, ATK, PIK3, and mTOR inhibitors. After identifying about 50 of those compounds, I examined the AUC data provided by DepMap to determine if any of these drugs showed large effects on DHL cancer cell lines. 

I would continue this work in a lab by confirming the vulnerabilities existed outside of DepMap data and then begin to perform in vitro and in vivo testing before moving to clinical trials for the most successful compounds.