Grant: DRA : Canada Graduate Research Scholarship - Doctoral Program (CGRS D)

Survival rates for ovarian cancer have remained largely unchanged for decades, partly because current treatments are not effective enough to cure patients. One promising strategy is immunotherapy, which strengthens the body's own immune system to fight cancer. While this approach has been very successful in other cancer types, it has not worked well for ovarian cancer. Our research aims to develop more effective immunotherapies for ovarian cancer using clinically relevant mouse models that closely mimic human disease. We believe that by gaining a deeper understanding of how the immune system interacts with ovarian tumors, we can design better treatments for patients. In our previous work, we found that immunotherapy alone did not improve survival in our mouse models. However, when we combined it with two additional therapies that activate immune cells, survival dramatically increased and 50% of the treated mice became completely tumor-free. In this project, we will study what changes occur in the immune system with this treatment that led to this strong anti-tumor response. We hypothesize that a group of immune cells called innate lymphoid cells play a key role by activating other immune cells, such as T cells and B cells, to enhance their ability to destroy cancer cells. To test this, we will treat mice with and without our triple-therapy combination, collect their tumors, and analyze the immune cells to understand how the treatment reshapes the immune environment. By uncovering how this therapy activates the immune system, we hope to identify new ways to make it even more effective. Ultimately, our findings could pave the way for moving this treatment into clinical trials, bringing us closer to improving survival and outcomes for people with ovarian cancer.