Cancer remains a central challenge of modern medicine. Because we continue loosing patients despite aggressive treatments, there is a pressing need for new therapies. In our research, we will exploit addiction of cancer cells to deregulated transcription by RNA polymerase II to discover new classes of targeted combination therapies. To do so, we will take advantage of highly selective inhibitors of transcriptional kinases. We will employ these in a powerful mix of comprehensive genetic screens in cancer model systems coupled with mechanistic and functional studies, which will lead to systematic discovery of targets of which inhibition eliminates cancer cells in combination with kinase inhibitors. In summary, we anticipate that our work will yield a rich resource of novel combination therapies for subsequent pre-clinical studies. Given that transcriptional kinases are general transcription regulators, the uncovered combination treatments shall have broad reach across cancer types.

2024

2028