Grant: Operating Grant

About 1700 Canadians die from brain tumours each year. Most of these deaths are due to an aggressive and incurable type of brain tumour known as glioblastoma. The long term goal of this research is to develop effective treatments for this disease. With our previous grant, we used a mouse model of glioblastoma to show that inhibition of a protein known as PKCiota markedly enhances survival. While this result is very promising, it has the limitation that the standard mouse model that we used does not fully recapitulate all the properties of glioblastoma in humans. The primary goal of this proposal is to test the effects of PKCiota inhibition in more clinically relevant models of glioblastoma. These models make use of glioblastoma cells that we have isolated directly from patients at our hospital. In order to validate PKCiota as a target for glioblastoma therapy, we will genetically modify these patient cells in ways that impair PKCiota function. The cells will then be introduced into the brains of mice and effects on the aggressiveness of the cancer cells will be assessed. This will be done using cells isolated from multiple patients to assess the overall feasibility of this therapeutic strategy in the brain tumour patient population.