October 22, 2020 -- Ideaya Biosciences has entered into a target and biomarker discovery partnership with the Sellers Laboratory at the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard. The partners will utilize a CRISPR paralog screening platform to evaluate functionally redundant paralogous genes across ovarian cancer subtypes.
The team, led by Dr. William Sellers, core institute member of the Broad Institute, hopes to generate novel synthetic lethality-based target and biomarker discoveries. They will use Ideaya's decipher dual CRISPR synthetic lethality platform, which was developed in conjunction with the University of California, San Diego.
The platform contains a library focused on DNA damage repair targets across various tumor suppressor genes and oncogenes. This allows researchers to evaluate approximately 50,000 independent gene knockout combinations of DNA damage response (DDR) pathway-related drug targets across known tumor suppressor genes.
In addition, Ideaya and Broad will collaborate to evaluate paralog CRISPR knockdown in selected cell lines in conjunction with pharmacological inhibition of Poly (ADP-ribose) glycohydrolase (PARG) to inform patient selection and combination strategies in both ovarian and breast cancer.
Ideaya has also become a member of the Cancer Dependency Map (DepMap) consortium led by Broad Institute.