A pan-Canadian team has developed a new way to quickly find personalized treatments for young cancer patients, by growing their tumors in chicken eggs and analyzing their proteins.
The team, led by researchers from the University of British Columbia and BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute, is the first in Canada to combine these two techniques to identify and test a drug for a young patient’s tumor in time for their treatment.
Their success in finding a new drug for the patient, described today in EMBO Molecular Medicine, shows how the study of proteins, known as proteomics, can be a valuable complement to the established study of genes (genomics) in real-time cancer therapies.
The work was a collaborative effort of PROFYLE (PRecision Oncology For Young peopLE), a key initiative of the Canadian…