A big donation is helping a team of researchers on Vancouver Island work on a project focusing on the origin and behaviour of cancer.
The Spatial Metabolome Hubble Project is receiving $2.4 million from the Terry Fox Research Institute.
The grant will go towards three research projects and the creation of the Spatial Metabolomics Hub over the next four years.
The hub is located at the University of Victoria and the Vancouver Island University campus in Nanaimo.
The hub uses advanced imaging technology to examine how cellular metabolism changes throughout different areas of tumour tissues. The goal is to figure out why certain immune cells are more or less active in some parts of a tumour.
The Terry Fox New Frontiers Program Project Grant is led by Dr. Julian J. Lum, a scientist at the Deeley Research Cancer Centre.
“While we are exploring a relatively new and small space in omics research, we hope our success will inspire other groups across Canada to dream big, like Terry himself, and come together to propose groundbreaking research that will fundamentally change the paradigms of how we approach cancer as a disease,” said Lum.
Lum and the team are keying in on metabolites because they’ve learned that cancer cells adapt to nutrient deficits.
“Our goal is to create high-resolution, metabolic cancer images that allow us to visualize metabolomes just like the stars in space,” Lum said. “By creating these metabolic maps, we will gain a new fundamental level of richness about how cancers hijack metabolism to disarm the immune system.”
The projects receiving funding are focusing on ovarian cancer, understanding the environment around pancreatic cancer cells and how tumour cells cope with metabolic stress in specific types of cancer.
Dr. David Goodlett, director of the University of Victoria’s Genome BC Proteomics Centre and Dr. Kyle Duncan, a Vancouver Island University chemistry professor are leading the hub.
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