Grant: Doctoral: Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships

An important goal in cancer research for personalized medicines is to develop techniques that can evaluate therapeutic strategy early on to assist oncologists in making improved therapeutic decisions. Recently, significant investment has been made in Canada by all levels of government to establish new facilities focusing on Positron emission tomography (PET) research and expected to play important role in Canadian healthcare. This unique medical imaging technique can extract biochemical information about an individual's disease at any location in the entire body without any surgical procedures and can provide pictures representative of overall tumour biochemistry, as opposed to a biopsy for tumour diagnosis. This project aims to develop PET imaging methods to eventually replace biopsy procedures to better predict which breast cancer patients are most likely to benefit from receiving Herceptin, a drug for Her2 positive metastatic breast cancer (Her2 is expressed on tumour cells while healthy cells do not show this molecule) and we will also investigate why women who have Her2 positive breast cancer that initially respond to Herceptin almost always become resistant within one year, a common and serious problem in cancer therapy. For this project, we will use a unique breast cancer cell line as a tool to study Herceptin therapy and resistance because these cells closely mimic the behavior of breast cancer in human patients. We will identify biochemical differences in Herceptin sensitive and Herceptin resistant tumours as well as metastatic disease to further understand why patients develop resistance and can this resistance be accurately predicted using PET. Also, less than half of all women who are prescribed Herceptin therapy receive therapeutic benefit. So, an accurate method to screen breast cancer patients for Herceptin therapy can avoid the unnecessary side effects of Herceptin, eliminate the time wasted to determine the therapy and decrease the health care cost.