Grant: Doctoral: Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships

All the blood cells in our body are produced by cells in our bone marrow called hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). As we get older, the DNA in our HSCs can become mutated, causing these cells to produce more blood cells than normal - we call this condition clonal hematopoiesis (CH). It is estimated that 10-20% of people over 70 have CH. People with CH are at a higher risk of chronic diseases like heart disease and cancer. This is because our immune (white blood) cells are also affected by the mutations that cause CH, leading them to produce more disease-causing inflammation. Researchers are still unsure what effects CH has on cancers. Some studies have shown that CH is linked with an increased risk of a patient's cancer progressing, while other have shown that the mutations that cause CH can help your immune system fight cancer and that CH can help protect people from cancer. Our research is trying to better understand CH in cancer so that we can use this knowledge to improve cancer immunotherapies, which are a new generation of cancer treatments that use the power of the immune system to fight cancer. Immunotherapies can be very effective in treating cancer, but they still have a low success rate because it is difficult to predict who will respond to the treatments. We have started a study looking at 10,000 tumours, comparing tumours from people with and without CH to see what is different about their immune response. Some early results from this study show that by creating inflammation, CH can make a type of brain cancer called glioblastoma even worse, but at the same time may make people with glioblastoma better candidates for immunotherapy. By studying glioblastoma biopsy samples from clinical trials and creating experimental models of CH and glioblastoma, we hope that we can better understand this effect and help discover new and effective immunotherapy treatments for cancer.