Finding ovarian cancer’s vulnerabilities
Cancer is not invincible but its weaknesses can be difficult to detect. An effort known as Project Achilles — named after the Greek warrior whose one vulnerability led to his undoing — was launched to develop a systematic way of pinpointing these weak spots. In their largest and most comprehensive effort to date, researchers from the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a Harvard affiliate, examined cells from more than 100 tumors, including 25 ovarian cancer tumors, to unearth the genes upon which cancers depend. One of these genes, PAX8, is altered in a significant fraction of ovarian tumors — nearly one-fifth of those surveyed in the study. The researchers results appear online July 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “In this project, we’re looking for all of the Achilles’ heels of cancer. That is to say, we’re looking for any instance where you inactivate...