Cancer Research

February 28th, 2017

Today�s show featured three graduate students from the program of Experimental Surgery of McGill University who are doing cancer research. Experimental Surgery is a graduate studies program offered by the Faculty of Medicine, whose aim is to do research in the different areas of the surgical subspecialties of medicine to better understand the mechanisms that cause disease, how can they be modified to improve the surgical outcome of people, and to create innovative approaches to surgery and surgical devices.

Our first speaker, Zhoufeng Zhou, is a PhD student in the skin cancer research group. She is studying the role of cancer stem cells in the development of cancer spread, better known as metastases. All tissues in the body have stem cells that help them grow and heal if they are injured. This also happens with cancer tissues; but the difference is that it leads to resistance against treatments and that it enhances the spread of the tumor. Thus, understanding how do cancer stem cells promote tumor spread could help patients prevent the appearance of cancer metastases. Zhoufeng�s research has tracked down one protein involved in this mechanism, and she is currently investigating whether its activity can be modified to prevent the spread of the tumor.

Bardia Barimani is a MD doing his Masters in Experimental Surgery. His line of work is researching novel strategies to repair bone after it has been injured by a metastasis. Once a patient�s tumor has spread, one of the main sites where new tumor growth occurs is on the vertebral spine. This may lead to pain and makes the patient prone to vertebral fractures, thus the current treatment is to surgically extract the tumor, leaving a big bone hole behind. Bardia�s research focuses on creating bone substitutes coated with a special drug that will promote bone cell recruitment. His preliminary results indicate that his bone substitute can deliver the drug in a local fashion that will help produce more bone and avoid undesired effects in the rest of the body.

Finally, our third speaker, Mina Ayoub, is working on developing novel treatment strategies for bladder cancer. Having a background as a MD and currently doing his Masters, Mina�s research interest focuses on discovering if the modulation of the immune system could lead to the destruction of bladder cancer cells. The importance of his research is that this type of cancer still has a high mortality despite the current treatments, thus, creating a novel treatment strategy may improve the cure rate of this disease. His results have pinpointed a protein that may be recognized by immune cells, making it an attractive target for immune modulation.

In conclusion, our young researchers are doing great progress in understanding how cancer cells spread, in developing novel treatment strategies against it and against its complications. It is expected that their results will be able to generate better treatments for patients in a not so far future. This is exactly the aim of the Experimental Surgery program: to create the future of surgery now.
If the audience wants to learn more about the program, or they want to contact our researchers, we invite them to visit our webpage: http://www.mcgill.ca/experimentalsurgery/welcome-experimental-surgery.