Grant: Project Grant

When breast cancer patients receive anti-cancer therapies, the tumour cells are initially sensitive to the drugs, but they often eventually stop responding to the drug and become resistant to treatment. This acquired drug resistance is a major barrier to durable treatment responses and contributes to the death of patients with cancer. These cancer cells are able to adapt dynamically to evade cell death triggered by these drugs. Using an innovative "sensor" we have been able to tag and isolate breast tumor cells that survive treatment with the chemotherapy drug, paclitaxel. We have amassed considerable amount of data on these resistant cells that escape cell death. We now propose to identify the molecular basis of this resistance and to expand on data that point to molecular pathways that identify novel biomarkers and therapeutic targets for treating recurrent breast cancer.