Pitch perfect: MCCB postdoc Jenna Whalen wins award at Equalize Startups Event

 

Congratulations to Jenna Whalen, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Sharon Cantor, PhD, on receiving the Judge’s Choice Award in the Tools category at the 6^th Annual Equalize Startups Culmination Pitch Event.

The event is a competition and symposium where women innovators pitch their startup ideas to a diverse audience of entrepreneurs, investors and university tech transfer professionals. It is the culmination of a six-month mentoring, training, and networking program designed to support women in launching university startups. This year, the event featured 35 women from around the world who pitched their ideas in four categories: MedTech, Physical Sciences, Tools and Therapeutics.

"It was an incredible experience to pitch alongside so many inspiring innovators and to be part of a community that’s championing women in science and entrepreneurship,” says Dr. Whalen.

She received the award for her pitch on GapScore, a platform with both diagnostic and therapeutic applications for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, which is most often caused by mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene.

Improving treatment selection and drug discovery

Current HBOC diagnostics and treatments are based on the long-held tenet that the core defect of BRCA-deficient cells is the inability to repair DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). According to the model, this DSB repair defect both underlies the sensitivity to anti-cancer drugs—such as PARP inhibitors, which are thought to kill cells by ultimately inducing DSBs—and is exacerbated by therapy, eventually accumulating enough DNA damage to trigger cell death.

However, despite DSB repair defects being the cornerstone of chemotherapy that guide treatment, the traditional marker for DSB repair deficiency—the homologous recombination deficiency (HRD) score—often fails to predict which tumors will respond to therapy.

Research in the Cantor Lab, bolstered by recent published work led by Dr. Whalen, has challenged this DSB-centric view. Rather than DSBs being the core defect, the Cantor Lab has demonstrated that single-strand gaps are the key lesions that sensitize BRCA-deficient cells to anti-cancer therapies and cause them to die. Importantly, the presence of these gaps in DNA accurately correlates with treatment sensitivity.

These results have profound translational implications, revealing that rather than using HRD score as a biomarker, a more precise and clinically significant marker for personalized medicine is likely to be the presence of gaps.

Enter GapScore.

As a diagnostic tool, GapScore may help identify which patients are most likely to respond to (or, alternatively, to be resistant to) anti-cancer therapies like PARP inhibitors, enabling more precise and effective treatment decisions. These gaps can be measured directly in patient tumor samples.

On the therapeutic side, GapScore can serve as a drug discovery tool to identify new compounds that induce or exploit DNA gaps, opening the door to a new class of precision oncology drugs—even in tumors that are currently resistant to standard treatments.

Dr. Whalen is pioneering GapScore through an eponymous startup company headquartered in Worcester, MA.