Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hi, my name is Molly Taylor,
I'm a Postdoctoral Scientist
at AstraZeneca,
and I'm going to be
talking today about the role
that microRNAs play in cancer,
and how we might be able
to target microRNAs
for developing
a cancer therapeutic.
0:19
So, cancer is a leading
cause of death worldwide.
For example, in 2012
there were approximately
14 million new cases
of cancer diagnosed
and 8.2 million
cancer-related deaths.
In 2000, Hanahan and Weinberg
eloquently proposed this model
through which cancer cells
gain their proliferative
and metastasic properties
that make them
really malignant.
And these properties are
sustaining
proliferative signaling,
evading growth suppression,
activating invasion
and metastasis,
enabling replicative
immortality,
inducing angiogenesis,
and resisting cell death.
And the collective
efforts of science
and medicine have
dramatically reduced
the annual cancer death rate
by about 20 percent
over the last two decades by
developing targeted inhibitors
that hit each of these various
different hallmarks of cancer.
So today,
I'm going to talk about
how microRNAs function
in these hallmarks of cancer
and how we might
be able to develop
new therapeutics
to target microRNAs
and thus develop
new therapies.
1:33
So the central dogma
of molecular biology states
that genetic information
is transferred sequentially
from DNA to RNA to protein.
So we go from the blueprint
of genetic information
contained in DNA to a transient
copy of that information
contained in RNA to the protein
that carries out
a function in the cell.
However, this model
only accounts for about
1.5-2 percent
of the human genome.
So what is the rest
of the genome doing?
