Sarah McComb Award for Cancer Research

The Challenge: Pancreatic cancer kills more people than almost any other, and it has done so for decades. Fewer than 1 in 8 patients are alive five years after diagnosis, a survival rate that has barely moved despite advances in cancer medicine.Those who are well enough for surgery go on to chemotherapy, but standard treatment extends life by around 18 months on average. That’s not a cure. It’s borrowed time. Doctors have no reliable way to know in advance whether a given drug will work for a given patient. And too often, precious time is lost on treatment that isn’t working for pancreatic cancer patients.

The Solution: At the time of surgery, we collect a small part of the patient’s tumour, small enough to go unnoticed, but enough to work with. We keep that tissue alive and expose it to different chemotherapy drugs, watching in real time how the cancer responds. Which drugs slow it down? Which ones does it shrug off? We call this approach “a living laboratory”. Rather than treating the average patient with the average drug, we’re using each person’s own cancer as a guide, testing
treatments against the actual tumour before any drug enters their body. The goal is to predict not just whether the cancer will come back, but when. With this approach, we hope to give patients and their doctors a clearer picture of what lies ahead so they can plan for next steps with more confidence.

Dr. Kelsie Thu

Scientist, Keenan Research Centre for Biomedical Science, St. Michael's Hospital

Scientists have identified a protein called CD47 that is commonly found on cancer tumours, but existing therapies have been unable to target it effectively. To address this challenge, Dr. Kelsie Thu has developed custom-engineered viruses that can target CD47 on cancer tumours—a potentially groundbreaking new approach to immunotherapy, which stimulates the immune system to attack tumours. Through this study, the team will test the viruses in tumour models with the aim of establishing this treatment as the next transformative immunotherapy for cancer patients.

THE CHALLENGE: Meningiomas are the most common type of primary brain tumour in adults. They begin in the brain and spinal cord. The standard protocol is surgery to remove as much of the tumour as possible, followed by radiation therapy. However, open brain surgery is an extremely high-risk procedure and standard radiation therapy is not precise leading to side effects of exposing health brain tissue. We need new non-invasive ways to provide targeted treatment for brain tumours.

THE SOLUTION: Dr. Vitor Pereira has designed a procedure that delivers a radioactive particle directly to the site of the tumour through a series of tiny catheters. The catheters enter the body through the wrist or groin, instead of through the skull. This procedure has shown promise for liver cancer. Now, they want to determine if it is safe and effective for brain cancer.

THE CHALLENEGE: Thirty to 50 percent of patients with breast cancer will develop intracranial metastatic disease (IMD), which occurs when a cancer that starts in one part of the body spreads (metastasizes) to the brain. The development of IMD has a significant impact on a patient’s survival and their quality of life. Women with metastatic HER2-positive (HER2+) breast cancer, in particular, are at a higher risk of developing IMD. The big question is why?

THE SOLUTION: We will analyze tumour tissue from patients with HER2+ breast cancer and IMD in order to determine if the development of brain metastasis is associated with loss of HER2 expression or resistance to medicines that target HER2. The study will give us insight into disease mechanisms that lead to IMD in these patients, and help researchers identify new targets for more effective treatments.