Project Leaders:   
Stephen Lam, Victor Ling

Involved Institution:   
BC Cancer Agency

Technology Applications:   
Personalized medicine, drug profiling

Research Funding Program:   
Applied Health

Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer death worldwide.  When diagnosed with lung cancer, more than 80% of patients cannot be cured by surgery or radiotherapy. Chemotherapy may control the lung cancer and/or metastasis but the current drugs are toxic and relatively ineffective. While many new cancer-fighting agents are in development, the challenge is to test them accurately, quickly, and economically.

One goal of this project is to generate predictive genomic signatures for chemotherapy response in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients using whole genome BAC CGH microarrays. This research team will analyze a large collection of NSCLC specimens from patients who were given chemotherapy with 32,433 unique and mapped data points. This will give DNA fingerprints that can distinguish who benefited from a treatment and who had progression of their disease despite treatment.

The second part of this project is to create a renewable and well-characterized repository of human lung cancers by transplanting small NSCLC samples into immune deficient mice. Therefore, a tumour can be tested multiple times to establish if it is resistant to more than one type of chemotherapy. The DNA fingerprint of cells that are resistant to different drugs will be determined. Furthermore, this system allows the same DNA fingerprints to be examined before and after treatments and gene expression can also be studied to further understand the chemotherapy response.

The predictive DNA fingerprints can be used to help patients and clinicians decide appropriate treatments. This research team proposes to start clinical trials in NSCLC, initially in BC via the experienced BCCA Lung Tumour Group and then through national and international collaborations.

Developing predictive genomic signatures of NSCLC tumours will lead to significant advancements in lung cancer treatment. It can identify the patients who will benefit from current treatment, saving health care resources but more importantly, alleviate the suffering of patients subjected to toxic but ineffective treatments. These signatures will also identify patients for experimental therapy trials and thus accelerate the development of new anticancer drugs. Plus, this research will provide comprehensive data of molecular targets for the discovery and development of new anticancer therapies.