Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Approximately 1 in 2 Canadians will be diagnosed with a type of cancer during their lifetimes, with a mortality rate of 1 in 4. One key contributor to the higher mortality rate is the spread of cancerous cells throughout the patient's body, called metastasis. Therefore, diagnosing and treating the cancer prior to metastasis would greatly improve the odds of successful treatment. One key player in metastasis are proteases, which are proteins that speed up the normal recycling of other proteins. However, in cancers, they can destroy the tissue around the tumour site, enabling their spread, and participate in other processes that enable tumour tissue growth. There is a significant focus on developing methods to monitor protease activity in tumours to ascertain the degree of aggressiveness and potential for metastasis. One method doctors use to diagnose cancers is called positron emission tomography (PET), where the patient receives a small dose of a radioactive drug, which enters the tumour and sends a signal to a camera, localizing the tumour. Furthermore, these radioactive drugs can be used to detect cancers based on specific traits. Our goal is to develop specific radioactive drugs that target select species of proteases overexpressed in cancers by putting a radioactive tag on chemical structures that bind to the proteases. These radioactive drugs will be investigated in animals carrying different types of cancers. This strategy has shown promise in targeting a family of proteases called matrix metalloproteinases and a protease called matriptase, both of which are highly expressed in aggressive and metastatic cancers. This research will enable the development of the next generation of imaging agents, enabling the diagnosis and differentiation of aggressive types of cancers, improving the prognosis of cancer patients in Canada and worldwide.