Hadar Golan-Berman has been a Manja Gideon Foundation fellow for the past two years. As a PhD student in Medicine, she has been researching the topic of “Gene targeting in repairing cisplatin-damaged DNA as a treatment for ovarian cancer” at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The goal of her research is to determine the factors that influence the efficacy of DNA repair. She hopes to identify new medication targets for cisplatin combination therapy in order to enhance the treatment’s effectiveness and precision.
As a student in the PhD program of the Faculty of Medicine, the MGF fellow possesses both academic and practical skills and knowledge. She not only brings her scientific drive for acquiring knowledge and understanding biomedical processes into her research, but also incorporates that research into the medical treatment methods used in real life.
Golan-Berman explains her research: “Cisplatin is a first-line chemotherapy drug used in treatment of ovarian cancer. Sadly, in many cases, the cancers exhibit or develop resistance to the drug. There are multiple ways for cells to become resistant, and it may be different for different cancer samples. In my work, I used state-of-the-art methods to study the mechanism by which ovarian cancer cells obtain resistance to cisplatin. We identified genes that we suspect are important for this resistance, and we are using both computational analysis and experiments on other cancer cells to test whether they are indeed driving cisplatin resistance. Identifying the key players in cisplatin resistance could allow physicians in the future to identify patients that will not respond to the drug, spare them the side effects, and direct them to alternative approaches. In addition, the genes we have discovered are candidates for novel ovarian cancer therapy.”
The Manja Gideon Foundation provides support for research projects.
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