Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Stomach cancer remains a deadly disease. In Canada, only 25% of patients diagnosed with stomach cancer survive five years after their diagnosis. Specific chemotherapy regimens established for stomach cancer have improved survival, however some cancers respond better to treatment than others. Unfortunately, there is no current way to predict which treatment is best for each individual patient. One way to personalize treatment for patients is to use cells from their own cancer and test how their cancer responds to various anti-cancer treatments in the laboratory. Due to new technological advancements we can now grow a patient's cancer cells in a three-dimensional space to form miniature organs, or "organoids", that resemble the patient's actual cancer. We hypothesize that organoids will respond similar to the patient's cancer when treated with the same anti-cancer therapy so that they may be used to predict treatment response. For our study we will enroll twenty stomach cancer patients and take a piece of their cancer prior to chemotherapy. We will then grow the cancer cells in the lab and treat them with the same anti-cancer drugs that the patient receives. Following surgery, we will compare the degree to which cells were killed in a patient's cancer to the number of cells killed in the lab to determine how similar they respond to treatment. The overall goal of our project is to develop tools that will allow for better prediction of stomach cancer response to chemotherapy so that each patient can receive the best treatment for their tumour. If successful, this study may provide evidence to apply these techniques to future studies with the purpose provide "precision medicine" to Canadian stomach cancer patients.