Grant: Project Grant

Lung cancer is a deadly disease and new therapies to target the biology supporting tumour growth are needed. Centrosomes are multi-protein complexes involved in cell division. One of their functions is to help cells distribute two copies of the genome equally into the cells produced during cell division. Normal cells have two centrosomes during mitosis and this is tightly regulated to ensure the genome is divided evenly. Lung cancer cells often have several centrosomes, a feature called centrosome amplification. This increase in centrosome number makes it more difficult for cells to carry out cell division, and can cause major DNA abnormalities and mutations that help tumours grow. Because centrosome amplification is specific to cancer cells and it can promote their growth, it is an attractive target for lung cancer therapy. The goal of this research program is to understand how centrosome amplification could be targeted to treat lung cancer. We will determine how frequently centrosome amplification occurs and identify strategies that lung cancers use to cope with the stress that it causes during cell division. Knowledge gained from these studies will inform how centrosome amplification could be targeted to treat lung tumours. We will then evaluate how well treatments designed to target centrosome amplification inhibit the growth of lung cancer models. Finally, we will investigate whether this new therapeutic approach can be combined with standard lung cancer treatments to enhance their abilities to kill tumours. The new discoveries from our research program will improve our understanding of lung cancer biology and specifically, how lung cancers cope with centrosome amplification. They will also provide insights about how we can take advantage of this cancer-specific feature to treat patients. Thus, our work has great potential to lead to the development of new therapies and drug combination strategies for treating lung cancer that could improve patient outcomes.