Grant: Canada Postdoctoral Research Award (CPRA) program

As a result of advanced diagnosis and treatment, many children survive their cancers. Although this is very promising, some of these children develop long-term side effects of the anti-cancer treatment received during childhood. For instance, doxorubicin (which is a very effective anti-cancer medication widely used to treat several types of childhood cancers) is known to cause minor injury to the hearts of these young cancer survivors, which can cause more pronounced heart issues later in life (with a high number of these issues being brought on by high blood pressure). Therefore, to help us understand how to protect the young heart from these drugs, we have created a mouse model to study how these chemotherapies harm the hearts of young mice. This model will help understand the early heart problems that might occur in pediatric patients treated with these chemotherapies and to test if an anti-diabetic drug, called empagliflozin, can make these chemotherapies safer for the young heart and protect against future heart problems caused by high blood pressure later in life. Testing the effectiveness of this drug is particularly exciting as recent evidence has shown in humans that this drug can reduce death from cardiovascular disease by up to 40% and more recent studies have suggested that the same drug may also be useful as a therapy for reducing cardiotoxicity induced by cancer treatments such as doxorubicin in adults. However, this drug has not been tested in children undergoing chemotherapy. Based on this, we are studying if empagliflozin is safe and if it can prevent early life anti-cancer therapy induced injury in the heart, and how that impacts life-long cardiac function following aging and high blood pressure.