Grant: Project Grant

Colorectal cancer is among the deadliest and most frequently diagnosed cancers in our country. Drugs currently used to treat colorectal tumors often fail to completely eradicate all types of cancer cell, giving an opportunity to the disease to come back (or relapse). Like many other cancers, colorectal tumors contain small reservoirs of malignant cells responsible for tumor initiation, relapse, and resistance to current treatments. Those are known as Cancer Stem Cells (CSC) and are recognized as "the root of cancer and seeds of metastasis". Previous research uncovered critical molecular mechanisms that are essential to CSCs development and maintenance. Importantly, those elements can be used as indicators in the quest to develop new medicines specifically eliminating CSCs from colon tumors. We have recently found clinically approved drugs with the capacity to alter CSCs biology while showing limited toxic effects in a normal cell model. These could represent new therapeutic avenues to safely eliminate cancer. In this project, we plan to demonstrate the capacity of those drugs to alter colon CSCs capacity to form tumors in mice, as well as in a unique culture system utilizing cells directly isolated from human patients. Moreover, we will use state-of-the-art techniques in biomedical research to understand how the candidate drugs can impact CSCs biology. Ultimately, the identification of molecules capable of suppressing colon CSC's activity would provide a new therapeutic option aimed at selectively targeting cancers, decreasing side effects and increasing patient survival rates.