New Grant Funding: AMOSO Clinical Innovation Fund Award
Dr. Parsyan was recently awarded significant grant funding from the Academic Medical Organization of Southwestern Ontario (AMOSO)'s Clinical Innovation Fund Award. The project is entitiled, “Spatial Omics for Novel Prognostic and Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Response Biomarkers Discovery in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer" and will further our understanding of molecular changes in response to surgery pre-treatment therapy and allow for the discovery of new biomarkers that will enhance our ability to treat breast cancer more effectively.
To describe the goal of this project, Dr. Parsyan writes, "Breast cancer cells change their molecules to grow, while cells surrounding cancer also change to fight it better and to not let it spread. In the most aggressive, triple-negative, subtype of breast cancer, or TNBC, this battlefield is often won by cancer, resulting in poor patient outcomes. Our lack of knowledge as to how TNBC and its surrounding cells change and interact with each other during the disease progression and how TNBC develops resistance to chemotherapy are the major roadblocks in developing more effective treatments. Discovering new molecules, or biomarkers, that are related to TNBC metastases, and its drug resistance is thus critical, and is an overarching goal of this project. We propose an innovative approach using ground-breaking technologies of spatial transcriptomics and multiomics that can find changes in TNBC and surrounding cells at the single-cell level and provide maps of the battlefield where these changes occur. In analogy with space telescopes, this approach provides an unprecedented look at the universe of cancer molecular changes to discover new biomarkers, that we can use to revolutionize TNBC treatment."
This funding will help support important research that is currently underway in the lab for the next 2 years.
