Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Triple-negative breast cancer, the most aggressive and difficult to treat type of breast cancer because it is made up of many different populations of cancerous cell types and has strategies to evade the immune system. Immunotherapies, which use a patient's own immune system to fight their cancer, show great promise in treating and curing cancer patients; however, only a small subset of have respond thus far. Tumour-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy, a cell-based immunotherapy, shows a strong potential for treating solid cancers. Lymphocytes (white blood cells) are an important part of the immune system, and those found in tumours are called TILs. Some TILs are like soldiers in the special forces; they have been specially trained to attack and kill cancer cells by being exposed to cancer specific markers in the tumour. This specialized training makes the TILs able to target multiple parts of the tumour, spread to distant (metastatic) tumour sites, and effectively clear tumours. In TIL therapy, a patient's tumour is surgically removed, the TILs are isolated and expanded (multiplied) in the lab, and re-infused back into the patient where they attack the cancer. TIL therapy has been effective in a select tumour types but has been largely unsuccessful in triple-negative breast cancer due to a lack of these special force immune cells in the tumour, making it difficult to isolate TILs for therapy. In this study, we are using cancer-fighting viruses to overcome this challenge in TIL therapy by inducing immune responses the tumour, which recruitments and trains the immune soldiers. In the Bell lab, we engineer viruses to selectively infect and kill cancer cells, sparing the healthy cells of the body. The viruses can be modified to encode a therapy, delivering that it directly to the tumour, boosting the immune response. Our modified cancer-fighting viruses will make TIL therapy a viable treatment option for triple-negative breast cancer patients.