Grant: Team Grant: Terry Fox New Frontiers Program in Cancer (LOI)

We are proposing to develop and enhance the use of ultrasound techniques to improve cancer treatment. We will continue developing quantitative ultrasound methods to detect and track the progression of the effects of cancer therapies on cell death. In addition, we will develop novel ultrasound-based therapies in order to improve current conventional cancer treatments. The ultimate goal is to apply both aims integrated clinically at the end of the proposed research period, with clinical evaluations of enhanced imaging and cancer treatment derived from these research objectives. There are four integrated complementary projects proposed that arecritical to bringing these technologies to the clinic. The first will see the continued development of quantitative ultrasound methods for the detection of tumour responses to cancer therapies at high and low frequency, for preclinical and clinical applications, respectively. The second will focus on correlative analyses with quantitative ultrasound approaches and will focus on correlating dynamic contrast enhanced MRI tumour data, and whole mount three-dimensional histopathological data, with the ultrasound data. The third project will be centered about evaluating quantitative ultrasound data from patients receiving cancer therapy using established methods in quantitative ultrasound and be guided by ongoing developments from the first two projects. The last project will further develop recent innovations in using ultrasound as an enhancing agent for cancer therapy based on our discovery of bubble enhanced ultrasound potentiation of tumor response. The overarching goal is to use our ultrasound methods to detect tumour responses to therapy. If a therapy is detected early on to be ineffective such methods could be used to guide changes from ineffective therapies to more efficacious ones. Such therapies can include chemotherapy, radiation therapy or new therapies including those to be developed as part of this application.