UT DRO Faculty receives Terry Fox New Frontiers Program Grant Terry Fox photo
UT DRO faculty members at the Terry Fox New Frontiers Program Award Announcement Photo Credit: The Terry Fox Research Institute/Bryan Kautz UHN PhotoGraphics
This September, UT DRO faculty members Drs. Bradly Wouters and Robert Bristow from Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, and Gregory Czarnota from Sunnybrook Research Institute, received a combined total of $8.6 million (of a $14.6 million investment) from the Terry Fox New Frontiers Program to support innovative research to develop new and more personalized treatments in radiation medicine. The third recipient of this grant is Dr. Sean Egan from SickKids.
Dr. Wouters and Dr. Bristow will receive $6.6 million towards the Hypoxia Program. The Hypoxia Program has been continuously funded for 15 years, initially led by Dr. Dick Hill. The team has previously observed that low levels of oxygenation (hypoxia) in tumours are associated with resistance to treatment, metastatic spread, and poor outcome following surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. The new Hypoxia Program is designed as a pipeline of translational medicine. It will further the understanding of the molecular basis of signaling in hypoxic cancer cells, discover new therapeutic strategies in relevant animal model systems, and finally implementing hypoxia-directed therapies into the clinic. Select patients will undergo tests to determine who will benefit from intensified treatments using molecular-targeted therapies that attack both aggressive tumour genetics and tumour hypoxia. The team, Lead Project members include other UT DRO faculty members Drs. Marianne Koritzinsky, Michael Milosevic, Anthony Fyles and David Jaffray, will be using these innovative and combined approaches to improve treatments in cervix, head and neck, and prostate cancers.
Dr. Gregory Czarnota will receive $2 million for the Quantitative Ultrasound Imaging Program which is looking at personalized chemotherapy using quantitative ultrasound and MRI technologies. Dr. Czarnota, in collaboration with Dr. Michael Kolios from Ryerson University and Dr. Greg Stanisz from the Sunnybrook Research Institute will continue their research in order to increase the efficacy of chemotherapy and radiation therapy using ultrasound and MRI. These are the two most common forms of cancer treatment. The research will also span breast and prostate cancer, two of the commonest forms of prostate cancer. Their research firstly focuses on using ultrasound to track responses to chemotherapy. They have demonstrated that quantitative ultrasound can be used a week into a 4-6 month course of chemotherapy to determine whether it is working or not. The goal is to use this technology if treatment is ineffective to facilitate switches to more efficacious treatment early on instead of waiting for months for conventional imaging methods to be used to assess treatments after they have been completed without effectiveness. They will optimize that methodology, as well as developing complementary methods in photoacoustics (specialized ultrasound imaging with optical contrast) and MRI methods to be used with anti-vascular and other treatments. They have also recently demonstrated that ultrasound-stimulated microbubbles can be used to increase the efficacy of radiation treatments whereby a 2 Gy dose of radiation combined with these treatments. They will scale up that research to large animal models and clinically-compatible MRI-guided systems with a view to having clinical impact through the introduction of these new methods in the near term. Those radiation enhancing treatments will also be combined here with photoacoustics in their optimization, and MRI-guidance and ultrasound and MRI-monitoring bringing together all the components of the proposed research.
These grants are awarded to teams who are working to find new cancer treatments. Our heartiest congratulations to both teams on this tremendous achievement.
You can view the Terry Fox New Frontiers Program announcement here: http://www.vvcnetwork.ca/terryfox/20140910/