Lead investigator: Dr Karim Malik, University of Bristol
Funded by The Little Princess Trust and administered by CCLG
Funded July 2018
Award: £99,986.00
One of the major challenges facing oncology is relapsing disease. Unfortunately many cancer patients, whilst responding seemingly well to initial chemotherapy, encounter secondary disease that has acquired resistance to the chemotherapeutic agents used. Elevating drugs at this stage can either not work effectively, and/or cause detrimental side-effects. It is therefore imperative to find out how cancer cells acquire the ability to survive chemotherapy.
Such problems are further exacerbated in neuroblastoma, one of the deadliest cancers of childhood. This is because neuroblastoma can arise as a result of a variety of genetic changes, and it is therefore likely that relapsing disease also occurs because of not one, but several different adaptations of the cancer cells to chemotherapeutic drugs.
To gain insight into how cancer cells become resistant to drugs, we have used a technique that permits identification of thousands of proteins within cancer cells. In two different neuroblastoma subtypes, we have identified proteins that may help the cancer cells become resistant. Each subtype displays a markedly different set of proteins, consistent with our hypothesis that treatments for relapsing disease may need to be personalized (tailored to the individual patient). The overall aim of this project is to establish whether these proteins represent targets in relapsing neuroblastoma, and whether inhibitors (a type of drug) of these proteins represent potential precision medicines for patients who relapse. Specific treatments such as these, or targeted therapies, will likely improve the standard of care for children with neuroblastoma and also other cancers.