Project Duration: 2019-2025
MOHCCN Consortium: BC Cancer Consortium
Investigators: David Scott, Christian Steidl
Partners: BC Caner, Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre.
The overarching aim of this proposal is to uncover the mechanisms of treatment failure, disease progression and treatment resistance in lymphoid cancers by performing comprehensive, multi-timepoint (temporal) genomic profiling of tissue biopsies collected from patients.
This will be achieved through 3 stages:
Collectively, lymphoid cancers are the 6th most common cancers in Canada, affecting patients of all ages. Advances in diagnostic accuracy and improvements in treatment have resulted in better overall survival for patients. However, when progression of disease occurs despite upfront treatment or an indolent lymphoma transforms to aggressive lymphoma, mortality from the disease across virtually all lymphoma subtypes is very high, typically exceeding 80 percent. Improvement in outcomes relies on development and delivery of better treatment regimens, informed by validated biomarkers, requiring knowledge of the determinants of treatment failure and lymphoma transformation. The overarching objective is to improve outcomes of patients with lymphoma through translation of an improved understanding of disease progression/transformation into precision medicine approaches.