Valuable methods to identify therapeutic target pathways in cancers: CRISPR screening and RNA seq

Introduction: Cancers are one of the most hard-to-treat diseases and are highly complex with respect to molecular signaling pathways. Cancers are genetic heterogeneous diseases, and therefore the identification and understanding of the key signaling pathways responsible for the malignant phenotype of cancers will yield new potential therapeutic targets. The use of high-throughput techniques is a shortcut to quickly find the molecular therapeutic targets. Two techniques that help to identify important molecular targets are CRISPR screening and RNAseq.Description: The CRISPR screening makes it possible to modify a large number of genes and to investigate their function in a single test. Therefore, this technique can be employed for knockout of the individual genes in genome-scale functional screens such as cancerous cell functional changes. RNAseq also demonstrates the existence and quantity of RNA in a biological sample in a specific point of time, and the transcriptome changes can be detected after analysis and comparison with the normal cases.Conclusion and Discussion: Accordingly, CRISPR screening, followed by genome NGS (to figure out the characteristics of the random mutations produced by CRISPR in the genome) and RNAseq, would be performed to identify the genome and transcriptome changes in isolated cultured cells with the desired phenotypic modifications. After detection of the effective pathways and genes, main targets interactions in such data possibly determine the best gene(s) for more fruitful drug development research. Also, the respective datasets can be employed to study interactions among important genes to assist gene therapy.