Grant: Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Primary lymphoid cancer is the fifth most frequent cancer in humans. Among those, Hodgkin Lymphoma (HL) represents the most common type of lymphoid cancer in young people in the Western world. Despite modern treatment strategies, about 20% die following relapse or progressive disease. To construct better treatments for these patients a better understanding of why HL develops is required. HL is unique amongst all cancers because the malignant cells, so called Hodgkin Reed Sternberg cells (HRS), are greatly outnumbered by normal immune cells surrounding the HRS cells. HRS cells make up only about 1% of the tumor, and this paucity has hampered molecular studies of these cells in the past. In the last 3 years our understanding of cancer biology has rapidly improved based on a technological revolution enabling the analysis of the entire genome of cancer cells. This technology is called "next generation sequencing" and we have already used this technology in our research team uncovering many new genetic characteristics of cancer cells. In this study, we will perform whole genome sequencing of purified, laser- microdissected HRS cells from HL patients by next generation sequencing. By these experiments we will for the first time uncover the "genetic landscape" of HL and this study will be one of the world's largest and most comprehensive biological studies of HL. The final goal of our research is to discover genetic characteristics that can be used as novel therapeutic targets. Ultimately, our findings will lead to the development of new drugs that will help to cure many young HL patients in the world as well as in Canada.