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

Although prostate cancers are the most diagnosed cancer in Canadian men, effective biomarkers for diagnosing them and predicting patient outcome and recurrence do not exist. A tumour is initiated by a small number of mutations in the DNA, the genetic material of the cell, and progress by creating more mutations which catastrophically transform the genome. In patients, cancer cells are not regulated by normal mechanisms so they grow uninhibited, damaging the organ(s). Curing cancer is difficult because every cancer is genetically different from each other and may contain multiple tumours with different behaviours, which we term genetic heterogeneity. I am specifically interested in the oxygen levels of tumours because low level of oxygen, called hypoxia, is responsible for enabling a tumour to resist chemotherapy and radiation therapy. For example, 25% of intermediate-risk patients treated with surgery and/or radiotherapy will relapse, and hypoxia plays an important role in it. My research objective is to find genes controlling tumour oxygen levels by analyzing and comparing the DNA sequences of tumours with and without hypoxia. The project will utilize cutting-edge DNA sequencing machines and bioinformatics softwares to identify specific genes in the tumour genome that control the oxygen level. Then, I will retrospectively assess how the genes affected patients' response to therapy. Ultimately, we hope to find genetic biomarkers that can be used in the clinic to improve diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of patients. Therefore, the project has the potential to benefit both cancer patients and health care providers. Identification of biomarkers with high clinical efficacy will help optimize treatment-planning.