Jenna Kitz
Jenna Kitz has a B.Sc. Honours in Bio-Medical sciences with a minor in Molecular Biology and Genetics from the University of Guelph. She is currently working towards her MSc. degree in Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Western Ontario under the supervision of Dr. Alison Allan. Her project focuses on the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition, and how this may affect the ability of prostate cancer circulating tumor cells to be enumerated by the Health Canada approved CellSearch System®. Often as cancer progresses to become metastatic, cancer cells will become more aggressive allowing them to break off the primary tumor and move, or metastasize throughout the body. This aggressive, or metastatic, phenotype is often also associated with a loss of the epithelial cell surface EpCam, which the CellSearch System® relies on to pull the tumor cells from a blood sample. As a consequence of this, patients with the most aggressive prostate cancers may be at a disadvantage using the CellSearch System®, as the system may be missing these aggressive metastatic cells all together. Jenna’s work will pinpoint the exact moment during the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition that the CellSearch System® becomes less efficient at enumerating mesenchymal circulating tumor cells, and will compare the CellSearch System® to other circulating tumor cell technologies available to determine whether another system may be more effective at enumerating these mesenchymal circulating tumor cells.
