NO. 43

CIMR Wednesday Lecture Series

Time:

Wednesday, Oct. 16 2024, 4:00 p.m.

Location:

Yifu Lecture Hall, North Basic Research Building 

Host：

Guo-Min Li  (李国民)

Chinese Institutes for Medical Research

Speaker：

Lee Zou (邹力)

Professor and Chair

Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology

Duke University School of Medicine

TITLE：

The ATR Checkpoint: from Basic Science to Cancer Therapy

ABSTRACT:

In proliferating cells, the integrity of the genome is consistently challenged by intrinsic and extrinsic stresses during DNA replication. Replication stress, a collection of different types of interferences with DNA replication, is a major source of genomic instability. In highly proliferative cancer cells, replication stress is elevated by oncogenic events, driving genomic instability during tumorigenesis and tumor evolution. The ATR kinase is a master regulator of the replication stress response in human cells. My lab has extensively studied how ATR is activated by replication stress and how it functions to protect replication forks under stress. In addition, our recent studies reveal that ATR is activated by different types of replication stress in cancer cells, and it plays an important role in keeping cancer cells alive under stress.

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