Sheera Adar, PhD

About the Investigator:

Dr. Adar is an assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the Faculty of Medicine and the Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her BSc in Life Sciences from Tel Aviv University, and her MSc and PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science. She conducted her postdoctoral research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Upon returning to Israel, she joined the Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University.

About the Research:

Cigarette smoking was officially acknowledged to be a cancer risk factor in the late 1950’s. Despite huge public health efforts along with governmental taxation and restrictions, 70 years later, smoking is still prevalent across the globe. Tobacco smoking has been associated with increased risk for many cancer types. These include cancers of tissues directly exposed to cigarette smoke, such as lung, head and neck, as well as those that are not directly exposed, such as bladder cancer, where 50% of patients are smokers. Tobacco smoke is composed of thousands of chemicals, at least 60 of which cause cancer.

Dr. Adar and her team are conducting research on benzo[a]pyrene (or BaP), a chemical known to cause lung cancer. BaP damages DNA, leading to the main types of mutations found in lung cancers. These mutations deactivate essential cellular protections and promote cancer development. The Adar team has created advanced methods using DNA sequencing to detect the damage BaP causes in human DNA and to understand exactly how it leads to mutations. With further testing, it is their hope that by identifying specific mutations in cancer samples, the processes that caused that individual’s cancer will be revealed and may serve as biomarkers for more personalized treatment.