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Your Environment. Your Health.

Publication Detail

Title: Inducing DNA damage through R-loops to kill cancer cells.

Authors: Lam, Fred C; Kong, Yi Wen; Yaffe, Michael B

Published In Mol Cell Oncol, (2020 Nov 20)

Abstract: R-loops are intermediate structures of transcription that can accumulate when transcriptional elongation is blocked by inhibiting BRD4. In normal cells, R-loop persistence suppresses firing of adjacent replication origins. This control is lost in a subset of cancer cells, where BRD4 inhibition results in R-loop accumulation, leading to transcription-replication collisions and DNA double-strand breaks during S-phase, followed by cell death. This finding sheds new light on the mechanisms by which BRD4 inhibitors function as cancer therapies, and indicates that targeting other cellular events to cause R-loop accumulation may be useful for cancer treatment.

PubMed ID: 33553604 Exiting the NIEHS site

MeSH Terms: No MeSH terms associated with this publication

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