Grant: Emerging Team Grant: Regenerative Medicine and Nanomedicine - LOI

Cancer remains one of the greatest challenges of modern medicine. The ability to treat cancer is severely limited by the variability and complexity of the disease, where the genetic mutations that cause cancer in one patient are often not the same mutations that cause cancer in other patients. This unfortunately causes current cancer therapies to be ineffective in large subsets of patients and so these medicines are unable to cure the disease. However, exciting new diagnostic technologies have recently been developed that, for the first time, allow clinical researchers to identify the genetic mutations that are occurring in an individual patient's cancer. Further, advanced therapeutic technologies, known as nanomedicines, are for the first time, allowing scientists to rapidly and specifically target those genes that may be the cause of a patient's disease. This proposal seeks to combine these advanced diagnostic and therapeutic technologies to develop methods that will eventually allow physicians to prescribe nanomedicines that are most effective for an individual patient. To accomplish this, we have brought together expert investigators in advanced cancer genomics and advanced targeted nanomedicines to strengthen Canada's capacity to treat cancer in this promising way.