Grant: Proof of Principle - PA: Cancer Early Detection, Imaging/Trans Therapeutics

Lung Cancer (LC) is the leading cause of cancer related mortality worldwide. Despite advances in treatment, the outcome for diagnosed patients is generally very poor. Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of genetically altered cells. There are frequently several populations of cancer cells with different genetic alterations within a single cancer. If any of these different genetic cancer populations are resistant to chemotherapy then the therapy will ultimately fail the patient. The goal of this proposal is to identify the different cancer cell populations within a tumour. Specifically we intend to identify cell populations resistant to treatment as the presence of these in the patient indicates they would benefit from alternate therapy. We propose to develop a hardware-software platform that would allow these measurements to be made in a high throughput robust fashion through the quantification of specific molecular (genetic) alterations associated with disease development of therapy resistance at the individual cell level.