Ofer Shoshani, PhD

About the Investigator:

Dr. Shoshani’s research focuses on understanding how catastrophic genomic events promote cancer formation and growth. He received his BSc and MSc degrees from Tel Aviv University, and his PhD in Molecular Cell Biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science. After postdoctoral training at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, University of California, San Diego, he returned to the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomolecular Sciences in the Faculty of Biochemistry.

About the Research:

For over a century, scientists have studied chromosome abnormalities in cancer and their role in disease progression. Recent DNA sequencing efforts have revealed that catastrophic genomic events, where chromosomes shatter and randomly reassemble, are common in many types of cancer. Dr. Shoshani’s recent research showed that these events drive the formation and evolution of gene amplification, which is an increase in the number of copies of a gene’s DNA, leading to strong drug resistance. Many aggressive forms of cancer, including those in the brain, breast, colon, and lung, have amplifications of oncogenes — genes that promote tumor growth.

Dr. Shoshani’s research aims to understand how gene amplification affects cellular functions. By using cellular models (such as HeLa cells, derived from cervical cancer) with different types and amounts of amplified DNA, Dr. Shoshani and his team will investigate how gene amplification leads to protein overproduction. They will evaluate how this overproduction affects protein synthesis and degradation and explore the possibility that overproduced proteins are secreted from cells into their environment. This research should show how cancer cells evolve and adapt to stress from too much protein by adjusting their DNA content and protein production or by secreting excess proteins.

The results of Dr. Shoshani’s work should enhance our understanding of how oncogene amplifications promote cancer, help to identify new targets in cancer cells with gene amplifications, and ultimately lead to the development of new drugs to fight cancer.