Development of experimental techniques for the analysis of amplicomics

癌症是一种由基因突变引起的疾病。我们携带来自父亲和母亲的两个个体基因，但在癌细胞中，一些基因的数量通过所谓的“基因扩增”而异常增加。越来越多的证据表明，这些“致癌基因”可以作为诊断和治疗的靶基因。我们的研究小组一直专注于乳腺癌，其中基因扩增经常被观察到，我们已经成功地开发了几个实验程序来发现致癌基因。例如，我们建立了一种方案，使我们能够有效地将基因引入正常细胞以测试转化活性，即它们是否产生癌细胞。最后，我们发现了一些可能作为肿瘤分子诊断和靶向治疗的基因。此外，我们还进行了功能分析，以了解“它们为什么会致癌”。

Cancer is a disease caused by mutations in genes. We carry two individual genes transmitted from father and mother, but in cancer cells, number of some genes is aberrantly increased by so-called "gene amplification". Accumulating evidence indicates that those genes, "oncogenes" can be used as target genes for diagnosis and therapy. Our research group has been focusing on breast cancer in which gene amplification is frequently observed and we have succeeded in developing several experimental procedures to discover oncogenes. For example, we established a protocol which enable us to efficiently introduce genes into normal cells to test transforming activity, namley whether or not they generate cancer cells. Finally, we found some genes which may serve as molecular diagnosis and targeted therapy for cancer. Furthermore, we performed functional analysis to know "why they make cancer".