Cancer Treatments

My Post Doctoral research aims to apply eco-evolutionary dynamics to develop new treatment strategies for ovarian cancer. I will investigate the environmental and molecular characteristics that allow ovarian cancer cells to survive initial chemotherapy treatment. This work will be done at Moffitt Cancer Center under the supervision of Dr. Joel Brown and Dr. Erin George.

 

High grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) is the most common subtype of ovarian cancer and the most lethal gyneacologic malignancy. Most patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage and the majority recur, leading to death. The cause of failure lies in the mismatch between our evolutionarily static, traditional treatment approaches and cancer’s ecological and evolutionary dynamics that adapt and change upon treatment, selecting for a resistant cancer cell population. Therefore, there is a critical need for evolutionarily informed treatment strategies that aim to predict and steer the cancer’s ecological and evolutionary dynamics to either control or cure advanced and recurrent disease.

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One major barrier to improving therapeutic strategies is our lack of knowledge of the dynamics that impact HGSOC recurrence and resistance and our lack of preclinical models that effectively recapitulate the complexities and heterogeneities of the tumor microenvironment. When treatment is applied, small numbers of cells often survive this initial perturbation as minimal residual disease (MRD). These cells can reinitiate tumours resulting in disease recurrence and progression. The different mechanisms of survival that give rise to MRD have important implications for subsequent treatment options. ​

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