Identification of the transcriptional drivers of dormancy in luminal breast cancer

Patients diagnosed with ERa positive breast cancer receive adjuvant hormone therapy, however twenty years post-surgery, up to 50% of women will have relapsed. This demonstrates how therapy succeeds in delaying relapse but fails to eradicate the disease. I will investigate the mechanisms behind treatment-induced cancer cell dormancy and how this leads to resistance to endocrine therapy. To achieve this, I am designing quantitative models using fluorescence microscopy and will eventually interrogate them via CRISPR perturbation screens to capture transcriptional and epigenetic dependencies of dormant cells.