Positioning Poly-(ADP)-ribose polymerase inhibitors (PARPi) for the treatment of Osteosarcoma

Sibylle Mittnacht, PhD discusses the current landscape of PARP inhibitor use in cancers and osteosarcoma and discusses preclinical evidence and translation of biomarker-driven use of therapeutics in osteosarcoma.

Dr. Mittnacht heads the laboratory of Cancer Cell Signalling at the University College London (UCL) Cancer Institute, with a long-standing interest in concepts that drive tumour development and therapy response in cancer. She acts as the cancer expert for the Royal College of Radiologists and is a founding member of the FOSTER (Fight Osteosarcoma Through European Research) initiative, where she co-leads the cell model and drug response focus groups and is a participant in a newly established initiative, icure, which aims to establish a living biobank and therapeutics assessment pipeline for rare and ultrarare cancers.

Work in the Mittnacht team centers on understanding how cell cycle checkpoint aberrations affect the behaviour of cancer cells and the identification of therapeutic opportunity that arises therefrom. The team uses functional genomics and chemical biology to discover new treatment paradigms with a current focus on unmet needs in sarcoma and breast cancer, and is involved in establishing patient-derived and tissue-mimetic preclinical cancer models for these cancers, in order to accelerate therapeutic discovery.