“The team, led by researchers from the UBC faculty of medicine and BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute, is the first in Canada to combine these two techniques to identify and test a drug for a young patient’s tumour in time for their treatment.
Their success in finding a new drug for the patient, described today in EMBO Molecular Medicine, shows how the study of proteins, known as proteomics, can be a valuable complement to the established study of genes (genomics) in real-time cancer therapies.
The work was a collaborative effort of PROFYLE (PRecision Oncology For Young peopLE), a key initiative of the Canadian pediatric cancer network ACCESS (Advancing Childhood Cancer Experience, Science and Survivorship) that brings together more than 30 research and funding organizations and over 100 investigators from across Canada to improve cancer outcomes for children and young adults.
The study by co-lead authors Dr. Georgina Barnabas, a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Philipp Lange’s lab, and Tariq Bhat, a UBC faculty of medicine PhD student in Dr. James Lim’s lab, focused on an unnamed patient diagnosed with a rare pediatric cancer that resisted conventional treatments.”
Read more on Researchers develop new way to match young cancer patients with the right drugs via UBC Faculty of Medicine.
JACQUELINE P. ASHBY 