Mouse Breast Cancer

The majority of human cancer genes identified to date are somatically rearranged in the small minority of human cancers comprising leukemias, lymphomas and soft tissue tumors. However, conventional strategies for characterizing rearrangements are laborious, low-throughput and have low sensitivity/resolution, thus the role of genomic rearrangement in human Breast cancer is unknown. The use of genetically engineered mice as a model to study human tumoral processes has resulted very useful in the last 25 years, offering the opportunity of model and control the individual contributions of genes or pathways to cancer development. We aim to use massively parallel paired end sequencing to explore the diversity of aberrant processes sculpting breast cancer genomes in mice and to identify novel rearranged cancer genes and gene fusions that may be future therapeutic targets to treat human cancer.