Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

. Despite the global research effort aimed at cancer prevention and treatment, cancer is still a major killer of Canadians. The cost of diagnosis and treatment to our health care system is staggering. We need better, early and accurate diagnostic tests of cancer to provide the best early treatments to improve treatment outcomes and reduce loss of life. Cancer can be detected early in patients by finding tumor molecules that leak into the bloodstream. These scarce proteins and their breakdown products are known as tumor biomarkers. However, collecting sufficient amounts of such biomarkers to make an early and accurate cancer diagnosis is a challenge. Blood is a very complex sample to analyze, containing many different proteins where the high amounts of some normal proteins mask the cancer biomarkers. Compounding this challenge is that some biomarkers are also present in healthy people, although at lower levels, but sometimes even with the modifications or mutations that are found in greater amounts in the cancer biomarkers. Together this makes cancer biomarkers very difficult to detect using current techniques and clinical tests. We aim to develop new techniques that will improve the detection of such biomarkers. We have designed and produced a specialized polymer material that displays many "molecular hooks" to pull out small protein pieces (called peptides) from complex patient samples such as blood. The peptides are then identified by a technique called mass spectrometry. We propose to develop five new polymers to enrich for five specific types of modified peptides that are found in malignant breast and oral cancers, but not normal tissue or benign tumors. By analyzing the unique fingerprint of these peptides we will establish a set of biomarker proteins that will be developed as a new clinical test for breast, oral and other types of cancer and to assess treatment options. Moreover, select biomarkers will point to new drug targets to treat cancers.