Grant: Doctoral: Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships

Lung cancer kills 1.6 million people each year worldwide and is the most fatal cancer for Canadian men and women. Despite major progress in our understanding of the causes of lung cancer, more than 85% of lung cancer patients still die within 5 years after diagnosis. The poor prognosis associated with lung cancer is in part due to lack of effective drugs and "druggable" targets, or can be due to the development of resistance to drugs after initial treatment. Therefore, there is an urgent need to determine what cellular changes cause lung cancer to spread and develop drug resistance, and to identify new druggable targets. Our research group and others have recently discovered that changes in the Hippo signalling pathway are critical for the development and spread of lung cancers and also for their resistance to therapeutic drugs. However, the precise ways in which Hippo promotes cancer growth and metastasis is not completely known and there are currently no drugs available that can directly target Hippo for lung cancer therapy. For this project, I have developed a light emission-based biosensor tool, to detect interactions between un-known proteins involved in Hippo signalling. This powerful tool allows us to discover novel regulators of the Hippo pathway, which are capable of promoting cancer cell proliferation and metastasis in cancer cells. We are the first group in the world who have used this approach to find novel regulators of cell proliferation in lung cancer. Results from this study will identify new cellular pathways that interact with the Hippo pathway, thereby contributing significantly to the Hippo pathway research field and will have the potential to provide us with novel targets for cancer therapy. In the future, I will use different strategies to further determine the connection between these candidates and cancer, thus providing a new therapeutic strategy for successful cancer treatment.