Grant: CIHR Fellowship

My research program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center will be focused on understanding the molecular abnormalities in lung cancer cells in order to discover novel therapeutic avenues in patients with lung cancer. I will be supervised by Dr. Marc Ladanyi, who is a world expert in this field. Dr. Ladanyi developed a new clinical tool to diagnose mutations in lung cancer called MSK-IMPACT, which is now approved by the Federal Drug Association (FDA). This tool allows doctors to identify a "driver mutation" associated with a patient's cancer. This "driver mutation"-an abnormal modification in the cancer cells' DNA -is responsible for uncontrolled cancer growth for the patient's specific cancer. Personalized medicine has allowed for physicians and scientists to specifically target this driver mutation, thereby blocking cellular replication and the growth of cancer. Despite these significant advances, patients with advanced lung cancer are rarely cured, and drugs that target these driver mutations only work for a short period of time. Therefore, new strategies are needed in order to overcome drug resistance and provide long-lasting tumor control for a potential cure. My research program will be focused on targeting MDM2 in combination with other drug targets to better control lung cancer growth. As opposed to the current method of targeting a single mutation, my project aims to combine two targeted therapies, which opens a novel therapeutic avenue. I will use advanced techniques in genetic sequencing and gene-editing technologies in order to better understand how these specific pathways cause cancer growth. I will perform these experiments in patient-derived xenografts, which are mice that have been injected with a real patient's tumor. This allows scientists to replicate the way the tumor behaves in a human and to achieve more precise results with a direct impact on patients. My goal is to bring this technology back home as a cancer researcher in Montreal.