Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

There are an ever-increasing number of treatments available for prostate cancer, however they can have considerable side-effects. A significant clinical problem is predicting how a prostate cancer patient will respond to a treatment. Experimental models to study prostate cancer are extremely limited compared to other cancer types which limits research into how prostate cancer is able to resist anti-cancer treatments. My research tackles this problem by growing prostate cancer cells from patient biopsies, using a specialized growth technique. These patient-derived tumor cells (PDCs) represent a promising solution since they are quick to grow and retain the original genetic and biological characteristics of patient tumors. Additionally, their lower cost and ability to be used in a range of experiments, including anti-cancer sensitivity testing, makes them an attractive tool for the early prediction of treatment response. Using this innovative technique, I have successfully generated 25 novel PDCs from both early stage and advanced prostate cancers. The aims of my project are to continue deriving a large representative panel of PDCs and to use them to predict clinical response to various treatments. I will treat these cells with anti-cancer treatments used in the clinic (hormone therapies, chemotherapy, radiation treatment), measure their survival, and then determine if this can predict how a patient will respond to a given treatment in the clinic. PDCs which have an exceptional response or resistance to anti-cancer treatments will be of particular interest for additional study. I will search for changes in the genetic material or proteins in these PDCs that may explain the altered response to treatments. Ultimately, my research will determine if PDCs are a promising approach for predicting how a prostate cancer patient will respond to different treatments. It will also provide new insights into why certain prostate cancer patients respond differently to treatments.