Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

The spread of cancer cells to distant site in the body is the major cause of cancer patient death. The development of secondary tumour is the major problem in cancer therapy. This phenomenon is mainly triggered by an oxygen deprivation that is found in the tumour mass. This oxygen deprivation is caused by a rapid and uncontrolled growth of the tumour where new blood vessels do not have time to develop properly. Recently, a novel mechanism has been proposed to describe the invasion and the aggressiveness of cancer cell that causes metastasis. This mechanism involve a new structure called invadopodia. These cellular structures are specialized structures directly implicated in the invasion phenomenon. In our laboratory, we have previously shown that the oxygen deprivation lead to an increase in the activity of some proteins implicated in the invasion process. We have targeted specific proteins that regulates these phenomenons. This project addresses the mechanism of the invadopodia formation under oxygen deprivation conditions. I will test the novel hypothesis that the oxygen deprivation influences the cancer cells and induces invadopodia formation leading to metastasis. The expected results with this project will lead to a better understanding of the invasion that occurs in cancer and that causes cancer to develop in several organs. These new informations will potentially lead to the development of new therapeutic targets to inhibits cancer growth and metastasis.