CIHR Projects
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PI: Ng, Sylvia
Pancreatic cancer is the most deadly solid organ tumor with a typical life expectancy of 3-6 months after diagnosis. Prognosis is poor because this malignancy is often detected too late for surgery t…
PI: Moon, Nam S
Accumulation of hazardous mutations is responsible for cancer development. Many genes prone to mutation in cancer are evolutionarily conserved, and their homologs have been identified in different sp…
PI: Nelson, Brad H
It has recently been shown that many ovarian cancer patients mount immune responses against their tumor. This is reflected in the fact that many ovarian tumors are densely packed with "T cells", a ty…
PI: White, John H; Gleason, James L
The hormonal form of vitamin D, 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 (1,25D) binds to the vitamin D receptor (VDR) and is a key regulator of calcium homeostasis. However, data from multiple sources, including on…
Much progress has been made over the last decade in our understanding of the cellular mechanisms leading to cancer. In spite of this, cancer still remains a major cause of human death. A novel antica…
PI: Bonni, Shirin
Controlled cell division, or proliferation, is essential for normal growth and function of the developing and adult organisms. Importantly, unchecked cell proliferation may cause increased number of …
PI: Lilge, Lothar
Photodynamic Therapy (PDT) attained approval for various oncological indications, but only for applications in the skin or other superficial tumours such as the bladder. Particular treatments of soli…
Epithelial ovarian cancer is associated with a high death rate, killing more than 17,000 women each year in North America. A lack of means to detect the disease at early stages, coupled with the abse…
Axillary lymph node status in breast cancer is the most important factor in predicting a patient's risk of recurrence of disease. Patients whose disease has not spread to the lymph nodes (axillary no…
Cancer is a disease in which cells of the body become growth deregulated. During development, cell division is normal and is controlled by signals transmitted by a class of proteins called kinases. N…
PI: Miller, Wilson H
Although considerable progress has been made in understanding the biology of cancer, effective novel therapeutics are still urgently needed in human malignancies. We have studied the mechanism of act…
PI: Jurisica, Igor; Oza, Amit M
Mortality rate from epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is higher than that of any other cancer among women in the North America, with staggering 63%. Currently, 75% of new cases are not diagnosed until …
PI: Dacosta, Ralph S
Radiation therapy (RT) plays a significant role in cancer treatment, and has until recently been thought to be curative by mainly killing tumor cells directly by damaging their genetic material (DNA)…
Characterization of the leukemia-inducing NUP98-HOXA9 oncogene using Drosophila and mouse models
PI: Therrien, Marc
Oncogenes have the capacity to transform cells and promote cancer. They often result from specific mutations that hyper-activate or change normal gene function and thereby force a cell to engage in a…
Optimization of immunotherapy of bladder cancer: response to various non-specific immunomodulators
PI: Fradet, Yves
Bladder cancer is sixth in incidence in Canada. About 75% of initial tumors are non-muscle invasive and although treated effectively by transurethral surgery, will recur in 50-80% of cases and progre…
Hypoxic cells occur in human tumours and represent a population of cells resistant to ionizing radiation. Clinical studies in several tumour sites indicate that the effectiveness of radiotherapy is i…
PI: Di Guglielmo, Gianni (John) M
Transforming growth factor-beta (TGFß) is a cytokine that normally acts as a tumor suppressor. However, in lung tumors it switches roles and aides tumor cells to become metastatic. We will investigat…
PI: Xiao, Wei
It is now well accepted that cancer is caused by DNA alterations and mutations in a group of cancer related genes. DNA repair plays an important role in protecting cells from such DNA damage and muta…
PI: Lepage, Martin
Pharmacokinetic modeling is used to characterize the environment of tumours. First, images are acquired using either magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or positron emission tomography (PET), a compound…
PI: Ramotar, Dindial
Project summary: Reactive oxygen species are highly unstable molecules and are produced, e.g., by mitochondrial respiration and activated neutrophils. These reactive oxygen species can attack and des…
Cells are composed of millions of molecules working symbiotically to maintain a cellular balance. If broken, this fragile orchestration of events could potentially lead to chemical alterations of the…
Gap junctions are traditionally made up of connexins subunits that form a pore allowing communication to occur between two adjacent cells. Recently a new family of gap junction-like protein called pa…
Glucuronosyltransferase (UGT) enzymes are responsible for the glucuronidation metabolic pathway and play an essential role in the elimination and detoxification of a large diversity of drugs from all…
Our immune system can eliminate cancer as it develops. However, due to reasons not fully understood, some cancers develop ways to avoid elimination by 'killer' cells of our immune system called natur…
PI: Chevrette, Mario
Numerous genetic changes occur as prostate cancer becomes more aggressive. We have shown that one such change is the loss of expression of CD9, a protein which is also lost in other human cancers. Re…
The tumor suppressor pRb is lost by mutations or functional inactivation in most, if not all, human cancers. The prevailing view is pRb controls cell proliferation and survival as well as differentia…
PI: Frappier, Lori D
Human cell nuclei contain several structures referred to as PML bodies because PML (promyelocytic leukemia) proteins form the basis of these structures and alterations to the PML proteins result in l…
Role of the atypical ERK3/ERK4-MK5 signaling pathway in cell cycle progression and tumorigenesis
PI: Meloche, Sylvain
MAP kinases are a family of enzymes that play important roles in the control of cell proliferation and survival. Accumulating evidence suggests that these enzymes may be implicated in the pathogenesi…
PI: Fenster, Aaron
With the exception of non-melanomatous skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the third highest cause of cancer related mortality in men. It is found at autopsy in 40%…
PI: Bedell, Barry J
While significant advances have recently been made in the treatment of a variety of cancers, brain tumours called gliomas have generally remained resistant to current drugs. As such, there currently …
Identification and functional analysis of a novel metastasis-associated gene in prostate cancer
PI: Wang, Yuzhuo
Most deaths from prostate cancer (PCa) are due to metastases (cancer spread) in a form that is highly resistant to conventional therapies. There is an urgent need for more effective therapy to improv…
Rapidly growing tumours contain many areas of low oxygen (hypoxia), and the presence of these hypoxic regions is associated with cancer metastasis and a poor clinical outcome. In a manner similar to …
PI: Kislinger, Thomas; Medin, Jeffrey A
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among North American men and is in general treated by surgery, radiation therapy or chemotherapy. Cell-surface membrane proteins comprise more than half of t…
PI: Rousseau, Marie-Claude; Nicolau, Belinda F
Previous studies have shown that certain types of cancer begin as lesions appearing in different parts of the body. This study aims to investigate these lesions in the mouth and throat to determine w…
PI: Jones, Russell G
Cell division is a highly regulated process. The ability of a cell to successfully grow and divide partly depends on the cell having enough energy and building blocks to complete the task. Cancer is …
PI: Jones, Russell G
Cell division is a highly regulated process. The ability of a cell to successfully grow and divide partly depends on the cell having enough energy and building blocks to complete the task. Cancer is …
PI: Young, James D
A number of nucleoside analogs have anticancer activities and are either in current clinical use or in various stages of preclinical evaluation. Since the pharmacological targets of nucleoside drugs …
PI: Li, Gang
Cutaneous malignant melanoma is a life-threatening skin cancer due to its high metastatic potential. The mechanism behind the high invasive property and metastatic potential of melanoma is still inco…
Mechanisms and consequences of three-dimensional (3D) nuclear remodeling of telomeres in cancer
PI: Mai, Sabine
We have previously shown that the structural order of the cell is changed when cells become tumor cells. To document this, we have studied one central component in the cell that is called the nucleus…
The recent success of Gleevec (imatinib) which targets the BCR-Abl protein kinase for the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia provides proof-of-principle for molecular-targeted therapy directed…
For some time we have used human adenoviruses as models to understand the molecular basis of cancer as such studies have provided many critical insights into processes of importance for cancer. In th…
Radiotherapy is an important form of treatment for cancer patients and has been shown to be useful in about 50% of patients with cancer. It can be used alone or in combination with chemotherapy or su…
PI: Marshall, Jean S
A number of bacterial and viral products have been shown to reduce tumor growth in models of cancer and in clincal trials, however we have a poor understadning of how these work. Mast cells are immun…
PI: Spaner, David E
Chemotherapy does not cure most cancers. However, the results with chemotherapy may be improved with treatments that increase the ability of the immune system to kill cancer cells (or immunotherapy).…
The detection and repair of DNA damage are vital for cell viability. DNA repair defects lead to DNA translocations, deletions/ mutations, chromosome breakage leading to 'genomic instability' and canc…
PI: Houry, Walid A
Hsp90 is a ubiquitous molecular chaperone that is found in eubacteria and all branches of eukarya. It plays a central role in cellular signaling since it is essential for maintaining the activity of …
PI: Rathee, Satyapal; Fallone, Biagio G
Nearly half of the cancer patients will receive radiation therapy for their treatment. Image guided radiotherapy promises to precisely align the diseased volume with the radiation beams in real time,…
PI: Brown, Grant W
Before a cell can grow and divide it must duplicate its DNA. In this way, when a cell divides to form two daughter cells, each of the daughters will receive the full complement of genes required for …