Exome Sequencing of Plasma DNA Portrays the Mutation Landscape of Colorectal Cancer and Discovers Mutated VEGFR2 Receptors as Modulators of Antiangiogenic Therapies.

Despite the wide use of antiangiogenic drugs in the clinical setting, predictive biomarkers of response to these drugs are still unknown. We applied whole-exome sequencing of matched germline and basal plasma cell-free DNA samples (WES-cfDNA) on a wild-type metastatic colorectal cancer patient with primary resistance to standard treatment regimens, including inhibitors to the VEGF:VEGFR2 pathway. We performed extensive functional experiments, including ectopic expression of VEGFR2 mutants in different cell lines, kinase and drug sensitivity assays, and cell- and patient-derived xenografts.

A high-throughput loss-of-function screening identifies novel p53 regulators.

The p53 protein is a sequence-specific transcription factor that plays a crucial role in tumor suppression by inducing apoptosis or cell cycle arrest in response to cellular damage. To identify novel proteins involved in the regulation of p53 transcriptional activity we have performed a large scale RNA interference-based screen. We have identified four genes previously unknown to be involved in modulating p53 activity (GAS41, RPS6K4, RUNDC1 and CRMP-2).