Fighting on All Fronts
As Dalhousie Medical School’s first Cameron Research Scientist, Dr. Graham Dellaire is attacking the cancer problem from many angles.
“Even with early diagnosis and treatment, one third of breast cancer patients will have a relapse within five years. Unfortunately, when it comes back, the cancer is usually resistant to chemotherapy,” says Dr. Dellaire, whose mother is a breast cancer survivor and whose paternal grandmother died from the disease. “Chemotherapy resistance is a serious challenge I take personally.”
He aims to:
- identify biomarkers that could help personalize chemotherapy and detect cancer at its earliest, most treatable stages
- look for ways to help tumour suppressor proteins stop cancers before they start
- to sensitize recurrent breast cancer cells to chemotherapy
Speeding Things Up
Dr. Dellaire and his team will use the RNA-interference (RNAi) library purchased through this year’s Molly Appeal to identify the genes behind chemotherapy resistance in breast cancer.
“Currently, we can only screen one gene at a time. The RNAi library will move our research forward by leaps and bounds, by allowing us to screen hundreds and thousands of genes at a time,” notes Dr. Dellaire. “Once we discover which genes are involved, we can develop ways to make recurrent breast cancer cells susceptible to chemo again.”
The RNAi library will also help Dr. Dellaire and his team find ways to rev up tumour suppressor proteins. These cancer-fighting proteins are found naturally in all of our cells, but sometimes they break down and stop doing their job.
This year the Molly Appeal will raise funds to purchase Atlantic Canada’s first RNA-interference (RNAi) Library. This facility will give researchers 70,000 genetic tools they can use to determine the function of every gene in a cell.