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Summer 2021 Bargonetti Research Team.

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Dr. Bargonetti’s takeover for TNBC Day 3-3-2021

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Introduction:
Hello, followers! I’m Dr. Jill Bargonetti, a BCRF researcher at The City University of New York at The Graduate Center, Hunter College, and Cornell Medicine’s Cancer Center in New York City. I research Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC). Here I am at the Graduate Center Library.
We’re learning more about the nature of TNBC disease every day, which is getting us closer to identifying treatments that not only destroy the cancer but do so without causing harmful side effects.

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The Bargonetti team and what they study:
My team and I are focused on the cancer-associated proteins mutant p53, MDM2, and MDMX in triple negative breast cancer. We research how these three proteins influence TNBC aggressive proliferation and metastasis (spread) and are looking for better ways to find and target cancer cells.
Pictured here with me are research associates Gu Xiao and Viola Ellison PhD; students Devon Lundine, George Annor, and Rusia Lee; rotation student Chelsea Marks; undergraduate students Clara Freedman and Amanda Day, and Hunter College graduate and past student Jorge Canar.

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Women in science:
I enjoy doing community outreach. As a black female scientist, it is important for me to share my voice broadly. This is a photo of me with my PhD student, Devon Lundine and a poster from the World Science Festival, which is an annual event produced by the World Science Foundation. As part of the event, I hosted tours of my lab for young women from local high schools.”

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Being a mentor/having fun:
Here I am with my PhD students George Annor and Rusia Lee in the tissue culture room. My laboratory research team does a lot of work using human TNBC cells grown in culture dishes. This work has to be done in special hoods (to avoid contaminating the cells with bacteria and viruses), and the cells are grown in incubators that we look at with microscopes. I often give members of my team advice on their experiments. I love working in the laboratory, and my team knows this. I mentor by example and work to help everyone find the joy in doing laboratory experiments and generating new data. We spend many hours in this room. Though we’re all very serious about our work, you can see that we do have a lot of fun together.
I also enjoy the time I spend teaching in the classroom. I designed an undergraduate college course called “Choreographing Genomics” that teaches genome information flow and cancer biology through movement. Recently, I have extended this class to include community outreach to people who have been affected by cancer. This helps students and community members learn about the molecular genetics of cancer together. We use post-modern dance—which assumes all people are movers and thus dancers—to assist in the learning process.

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Lab discovery:
Here, my research associate, Gu Xiao, is pointing out a TNBC cell line that was engineered using CRISPR—a technology that allows us to edit genes—to get rid of mutant p53. We see that this inhibits the proliferation of the cancer cells. Gu is showing me a resulting CRISPR mutant p53 knockout cell that we observed had four nuclei when the mutant p53 gene was removed. Getting rid of the mutant p53 made the cells no longer able to divide, so they soon died.
Gu was very excited to see this because we want to be able to kill cells in a patient, and her observation gives us clues about how to achieve this. Surviving TNBCs often proliferate well and metastasize, so we want to stop them in their tracks

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Bargonetti team at the Belfer Research Laboratory Lobby:
My team and I published results in 2020 in the journal Cancer Research. We identified a potential targeted treatment for TNBC. We found that the presence of both mtp53 and PARP proteins could be a good identifier of TNBCs that would respond to combined treatment with talazoparib—a PARP inhibitor that was developed to treat breast cancers with the BRCA mutation—and temozolomide, which is a chemotherapy agent that is used to treat some brain cancers. These are preliminary findings, but we plan to replicate the study in animal models.
I believe that reclassifying TNBC to a targetable type of cancer is critical, and our discovery opens up the possibility of being able to reclassify many TNBCs to be targetable ‘mutant p53/PARP-positive’ breast cancers. We’re very excited about what this could mean for TNBC patients in the future.
Thank you for visiting our laboratory! —Dr. Jill Bargonetti

Summer 2019

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Our summer lab trip to see free Shakespeare in the park.

Bargonetti team celebrating getting our 5-year NIH grant.

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The Bargonetti team celebrating getting our 5-year NIH R01 award. The Role of the Mutant p53-PARP-MCM Pathway in Triple Negative Breast Cancer https://grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-CA239603-01A1

Belfer 2016

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Melissa Graduates

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Summer 2013 Lab Trip

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Summer 2010 Lab Trip

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Last Updated ( Friday, 15 April 2022 16:02 )