Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

One aspect that allows cancer cells to proliferate is their ability to thrive despite living in stressful environments. Stresses include lack of nutrients or oxygen, which is especially prevalent in the center of solid tumours, where there is limited blood supply. When developing new treatments for cancer, we can use this to our advantage by designing therapeutics that inhibit the molecular pathways that allow cancer cells to respond to stress. In my research I will use the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, an excellent animal model to study stress because it shares similar stress response pathways with humans. I will analyze several new genes that our lab recently found to act in the low oxygen response. I will also use human lung cancer cells to determine if the human equivalent of one of these stress response pathway genes is required for the cancer cells to survive in low oxygen. This research will help characterize the molecular response to stress, thus providing us with new potential cancer drug targets.