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

Cellular growth and development are regulated through a complex and coordinated molecular mechanisms. Disruption in regulation of growth and development leads to malignancies, such as leukemia. Leukemia is a cancer of blood cells. To better understand this disease, we need to investigate molecular mechanisms involved in normal blood cells and leukemic blood cells development. Understanding molecular mechanism responsible for leukemia development allows us to create better therapeutic arsenal against this disease. Here I am proposing a novel method to look at molecular changes in transformed blood cells at high resolution and in a high throughput fashion. The advantage of this method is its low number of cell requirement, which makes it suitable to be applied to rare clinical samples. I will apply cutting edge next generation sequencing technologies along with our new methodology to primary human cord blood stem cells and primary patient leukemia cells. Later on I will compare normal and transformed blood cells to identify the molecular mechanisms responsible for leukemia development. As a result of my project, we will identify biological targets and molecular markers that are useful in diagnosis and treatment of leukemia.