Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Research Scholarships - Master's program

The most common and lethal form of ovarian cancer presents with non-specific symptoms, leading to late diagnosis and low survival rates. Current treatments for ovarian cancer are ineffective, as resistance to chemotherapy drugs often develops, which allows the cancer to keep growing and become more aggressive. A promising approach to improve therapies for ovarian cancer involves targeting the immune system to recognize and kill cancer cells while leaving healthy cells unaffected. An important balance exists between cells that promote the immune response and those that suppress it. In cancer, many mediators suppress the immune response by recruiting immune cells that promote this phenotype. This project aims to investigate the effects of inhibiting these immunosuppressive cell types and factors to improve treatment responses to ovarian cancer. We hypothesize that a specific subset of macrophages, called Triggering Receptor Expressed on Myeloid cells 2 (TREM2) + macrophages, drive these suppressive immune responses in ovarian cancer, and therefore blocking them would slow tumour progression.