September 2016  

Based on 2010 estimates from the Canadian Cancer Society, about 1 in 9 Canadian women is expected to develop breast cancer during her lifetime and 1 in 30 will die from it. Triple Negative Breast Cancers (TNBC) represent 15-20% of all diagnosed breast cancers and show poor prognosis. A huge improvement is possible concerning this area of research and will directly impact a large number of patients.
 

September 2016

As a recently graduated immunologist, I have been trained in understanding how individual surface proteins on immune cells can control the magnitude and quality of the immune response. The immune response is diverse and fascinating: in the presence of infectious agents, the immune cells proliferate and mount an attack, while in other events such as pregnancy or graft transplantation, there is a complete paradigm shift with the immune system becoming tolerant.

September 2016

Understanding how genes regulate embryogenesis is vital to development and cancer. Pax protein family is involved in regulating organ development as well as in cancer progression. Pax2/8 genes are found to regulate renal specification and morphogenesis in space and time. They act on key developmental processes such as cell commitment, mesenchymal-epithelial transition and epithelial tissue elongation.

September 2016

Ovarian cancer is a disease frequently known as the “silent killer”. This is due to the fact that in the majority of cases, there are no symptoms associated with the disease until it has progressed to advanced stages, at which point the prediction of the outcome is very poor.

This project aims to understand a mechanism by which ovarian cancer may gain the ability to spread throughout the body.

September 2016  

Breast cancer, according to the Canadian Cancer Society, is one of the leading cause of death from cancer for Canadian women. Thus it is important to understand the underlying mechanisms to improve prevention and existing treatments of breast cancer for the well being of our future generations. In the last decades, cancer research has increasingly emphasized on the importance of cellular bioenergetics in uncontrolled cell proliferation, irrespective of subtypes and drugs that target tumour metabolism and that are being explored as anti-cancer agents.

September 2016

Cancer is still the leading cause of death among Canadians, with metastatic cancers accounting for over 90% of those deaths. The liver is a common site of metastasis, with breast and colorectal cancers (CRC) being two of the most common that spread to this organ.

Breast and CRC patients with unresectable hepatic metastases have a 5-year survival rate of respectively 5.5–8.5% and less than 2%. Therefore, there is a pressing need to identify novel regulators of liver metastases.

September 2016  

Epigenetic dysregulation is important in leukemia development. How this occurs through genome-wide chromatin reorganization and modifications remains largely unclear.

Our lab has been focused on two paralogous histone acetyltransferases called MOZ and MORF. Their genes have recently been identified as two high-ranking targets amplified in different types of cancer.

September 2016

My project is “Characterization of cancer-specific signalling pathways in Kirsten Rat Sarcoma virus (KRAS)-driven colon cancer”. Colon cancer is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer and the second most common cause of cancer death. During the past decades, the mortality rate has decreased with diagnostic and treatments advanced, however, regulating factors and mechanisms implicated in colon cancer remain to be explored. In colorectal cancer, approximately 30%-40% have KRAS mutations, which plays an important role in the multi-step process in carcinogenesis.

Recent studies indicate that the serine/threonine kinase Protein Kinase C iota (PKCι), which is a wellknown polarity protein, is required for Ras-induced transformation and carcinogenesis in the colon, and in other cancer types.

September 2016

Breast cancer (BC) remains the most common cancer diagnosed in Canadian women over the age of twenty. Specific types of this disease are able to spread from the primary tumor to distant sites in the body, a process known as metastasis: a leading cause of cancer deaths. Essentially, cancer cells need energy to fuel their uncontrolled growth and to deal with stressful conditions especially when metastasizing.

September 2016  

One in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer and it is the second leading cause of death from cancer in women. Stat3 is a transcription factor that causes the expression of many genes that are involved in important processes such as cell survival, growth and escape from the immune system, all of which are important for cancer to progress and metastasize. Stat3 expression has been shown to be upregulated in 35-60% of breast cancer tissue and cell lines and is correlated with poor prognosis.