Lord, Christopher J.

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Lord, Christopher J.
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Lord, Christopher J.

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  • Publication
    ATR inhibitors as a synthetic lethal therapy for tumours deficient in ARID1A
    (Springer Nature, 2016-12-13)
    Williamson, Chris T. 
    ;
    Miller, Rowan 
    ;
    Pemberton, Helen N. 
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    Jones, Samuel E. 
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    Campbell, James 
    ;
    Konde, Asha 
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    Badham, Nicholas 
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    Rafiq, Rumana 
    ;
    Brough, Rachel 
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    Gulati, Aditi 
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    Ryan, Colm J. 
    ;
    Francis, Jeff 
    ;
    Vermulen, Peter B. 
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    Reynolds, Andrew R. 
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    Reaper, Philip M. 
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    Pollard, John R. 
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    Ashworth, Alan 
    ;
    Lord, Christopher J. 
    Identifying genetic biomarkers of synthetic lethal drug sensitivity effects provides one approach to the development of targeted cancer therapies. Mutations in ARID1A represent one of the most common molecular alterations in human cancer, but therapeutic approaches that target these defects are not yet clinically available. We demonstrate that defects in ARID1A sensitize tumour cells to clinical inhibitors of the DNA damage checkpoint kinase, ATR, both in vitro and in vivo. Mechanistically, ARID1A deficiency results in topoisomerase 2A and cell cycle defects, which cause an increased reliance on ATR checkpoint activity. In ARID1A mutant tumour cells, inhibition of ATR triggers premature mitotic entry, genomic instability and apoptosis. The data presented here provide the pre-clinical and mechanistic rationale for assessing ARID1A defects as a biomarker of single-agent ATR inhibitor response and represents a novel synthetic lethal approach to targeting tumour cells.
      465Scopus© Citations 247
  • Publication
    A Compendium of Co-regulated Protein Complexes in Breast Cancer Reveals Collateral Loss Events
    (Elsevier, 2017-10-25)
    Ryan, Colm J. 
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    Kennedy, Susan A. 
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    Bajrami, Ilirjana 
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    Matallanas, David 
    ;
    Lord, Christopher J. 
    Protein complexes are responsible for the bulk of activities within the cell, but how their behavior and abundance varies across tumors remains poorly understood. By combining proteomic profiles of breast tumors with a large-scale protein-protein interaction network, we have identified a set of 285 high-confidence protein complexes whose subunits have highly correlated protein abundance across tumor samples. We used this set to identify complexes that are reproducibly under- or overexpressed in specific breast cancer subtypes. We found that mutation or deletion of one subunit of a co-regulated complex was often associated with a collateral reduction in protein expression of additional complex members. This collateral loss phenomenon was typically evident from proteomic, but not transcriptomic, profiles, suggesting post-transcriptional control. Mutation of the tumor suppressor E-cadherin (CDH1) was associated with a collateral loss of members of the adherens junction complex, an effect we validated using an engineered model of E-cadherin loss. Ryan et al. develop an approach to identify co-regulated protein complexes from breast tumor proteomic profiles and demonstrate that genomic loss of one subunit is often associated with a reduction in the protein expression of an entire complex.
      19Scopus© Citations 35