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

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, mainly due to the lack of effective drugs available. This project studies a new way to inhibit lung cancer cells that focuses on exploiting cancer's inability to balance a chemical process called redox. A large-scale screen of ~200,000 chemical compounds revealed a new drug that selectively kills lung cancer cells but not normal cells. We discovered that in lung cancer cells, this drug disrupts redox balance, and that normal cells are resistant to its effects. This project aims to find the molecular target for this new drug and to understand how, in detail, it kills cancer cells. By using a new drug to prove that redox balance is a weakness of lung cancer cells, we can bring forward a new strategy for cancer therapeutics. This approach may also yield applications for other cancer types and therefore has significant potential to move drug development forward and impact a large subset of cancer patients.