Greehey CCRI Seminar Series – Fall ’25: Manjeet Rao, PhD (UTHSA)
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The overall goal of my laboratory is to develop more potent and less toxic drugs for treating adult and pediatric cancer patients. We have employed unbiased high-throughput genomewide functional screens as well as small molecular screens to identify novel targets that are critical for growth, progression, and drug sensitivity in medulloblastoma and osteosarcoma. In particular, using the loss-of-function screens, we have identified key genes that play critical/causal roles in the growth and metastasis, as well as in the chemosensitivity of osteosarcoma. Furthermore, by performing small-molecule library screens, we have identified inhibitors of these proteins that may act as novel therapeutics for treating osteosarcoma. Another area of our interest involves understanding the role of RNA epigenetic modifiers in osteosarcoma. In particular, we have identified RNA demethylase as a driver protein that may amplify oncogenic programs in osteosarcoma by regulating DNA replication, DNA repair, and genomic integrity. We aim to develop novel small-molecule inhibitors against RNA demethylase that can potentially serve as RNA mimetics, which can abolish the activity of this protein in OS.