Circadian clocks are fundamental, time-tracking systems that allow organisms to adapt to the appropriate time of day, and drive many physiological and cellular processes. Epidemiological evidence has shown that alteration of circadian rhythms via night-shift work, chronic jet lag, or other conditioning, leads to increased susceptibility to breast and other cancers, metabolic and cardiovascular diseases, and immune dysregulation. In cases of cancer, altered rhythms have been correlated with worse patient prognoses and drug resistance during treatment. On a molecular level, however, there is little that is known.

Since the ability to track circadian rhythms in real time is a fundamental requirement for this research, we are in the process of generating detectable entities (luciferase reporters) for both proteins that are core elements of the clock and cancer-associated proteins expressed in a circadian manner. These reporters will be used to evaluate changes in rhythm across cancers of varying severity, but also in studies where we will chemically alter the circadian rhythms using small molecules. Concurrently, we will affect the oncogenic characteristics of cells and seek accompanying changes to circadian rhythms. This work will not only shed new light on a driver of cancer, but also provide new targets and drugs for treatments.