Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in Texas, and in more than 70 percent of cases, the hormone estrogen and its receptor are crucial for its development. Hormone therapy can be initially successful in putting breast cancer into remission, but even then, more than 30 percent of those patients eventually develop resistance. When the cancer recurs it is more aggressive.
Now a biomedical scientist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, hopes to find better ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat hormone-resistant breast cancers in South Texas.
Zhijie (Jason) Liu was recruited in 2016 from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of California, San Diego, where he was a project scientist, with the help of a First-Time Tenure-Track Award from CPRIT.
Liu is investigating the regulation of genes involved in breast cancer, trying to understand which genes are turned on and off in cancer cells at different stages. He’s also interested in how estrogen regulates breast cancer to begin with and how cancer evolves to persist in the absence of estrogen.
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Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in Texas, and in more than 70 percent of cases, the hormone estrogen and its receptor are crucial for its development. Hormone therapy can be initially successful in putting breast cancer into remission, but even then, more than 30 percent of those patients eventually develop resistance. When the cancer recurs it is more aggressive.
Now a biomedical scientist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, hopes to find better ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat hormone-resistant breast cancers in South Texas.
Zhijie (Jason) Liu was recruited in 2016 from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of California, San Diego, where he was a project scientist, with the help of a First-Time Tenure-Track Award from CPRIT.
Liu is investigating the regulation of genes involved in breast cancer, trying to understand which genes are turned on and off in cancer cells at different stages. He’s also interested in how estrogen regulates breast cancer to begin with and how cancer evolves to persist in the absence of estrogen.
To do so, he is sequencing cancer cells at different stages—early stage, sensitive to estrogen therapy, vs. later stage, treatment-resistant—and comparing which genes are activated across the entire genome. He’s found several important key drivers of the evolution of breast cancer into the more aggressive hormone-therapy–resistant form.
He’s now collaborating with chemists to screen for small molecules that target and disrupt these key drivers, hoping to find new drugs that could be used in combination with hormone therapy to give patients a better shot at beating their cancers. “Our goal is to figure out how to evolve resistant cancers back into sensitive ones,” Liu says.
He is also using computational methods to perform bioinformatic analyses to figure out which genes work together—and which pathways would be most sensitive to disruption. He acknowledges that the plasticity of cancers is a problem but tackling the drivers of that plasticity could give researchers an opening.
CPRIT support enabled Liu to tackle the complexity of breast cancer from several different directions. “I could hire more people at the start and do more extensive research, especially in genomics, which is very expensive,” he says.
He adds that CPRIT enables Texas to recruit a wide variety of cancer biologists in different fields, allowing for the kinds of collaborations essential for making progress in understanding and treating cancer.
Liu has received $1.85 million in follow-on funding since coming to Texas, including: UT Rising STARs Award, V Foundation’s V Scholar Plus Award, Susan G. Komen Career Catalyst Research Award, Voelcker Fund Young Investigator Award; and is experimental director on a grant from the National Cancer Institutes.
Liu received his undergraduate training in biochemistry at Lanzhou University in Gansu, China, and a master’s degree in molecular genetics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. He came to the U.S. to pursue a Ph.D. in genetics at the University of Georgia, which he received in 2007. He began a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSD in 2008, and became a project scientist there starting in 2013.
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