Research at the Goodman Cancer Institute is focused within five main scientific themes. Each theme addresses fundamental aspects of cancer biology with powerful technologies and a collaborative, multidisciplinary and patient-centric approach. Our groundbreaking work is leading to new therapeutic strategies to address areas of unmet clinical need in the most prevalent cancers.
Innovation in Cancer Therapeutics
Each type of cancer is driven by multiple – possibly dozens – of somatic genetic mutations that drive cell autonomous changes in signaling pathways. These changes ultimately influence cell growth characteristics and tumorigenicity, modify how a cancer cell interacts with its microenvironment, determine whether or not life-threatening metastasis occurs, and dictate the fate of cancer stem cells.
The genomics era, however, has ushered in unprecedented advances in characterizing the genetic makeup of individual tumors, providing a potential roadmap of both the cancer itself and the personalized approach to treating an individual patient.
Many researchers at the Goodman Cancer Research Centre advance such therapeutic opportunities using sophisticated molecular tools, genetically defined preclinical animal models, clinical tumor samples, and functional genomics to identify and validate either new drugs and therapeutic opportunities or to improve the outcomes of existing therapies. Our strong commitment to work closely with clinical oncologists helps ensure that such research may be meaningfully translated to cancer patients.
Team members: Sid Huang, Jerry Pelletier, Morag Park, Logan Walsh, Vincent Giguere, Peter Siegel, Michel Tremblay, Nahum Sonenberg, Alain Nepveu
Cellular Stemness and Plasticity
The Stemness and plasticity group focuses on the cellular and molecular mechanisms driving cell fate decisions and plasticity in the context of cancer and embryo development. The research interests include stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), and progenitor biology but also lineage specification, epithelial-mesenchymal transition, cell polarity and cell (de)differentiation.
Team members: Yojiro Yamanaka, Maxime Bouchard, Michel Tremblay, Luke McCaffrey, Thomas Duchaine
Oncometabolism
In order to divide and migrate to distant sites, cancer cells require specific nutrients and a sufficient supply of energy. Researchers at the Goodman Cancer Research Centre are working collaboratively to understand how cancer cells meet the energy and resource requirements of rapid growth and metastasis. This is the study of cellular metabolism or, more precisely, oncometabolism.
Interestingly, the metabolism of cancer cells is quite different from that of normal cells. Recent work by members of the GCRC oncometabolism team and their partners has identified key regulators of cancer cell metabolism, revealing that these deregulated metabolic pathways are strongly associated with resistance to treatment and with metastatic progression. Research at the GCRC has also shown that metastatic cancer cells have unique metabolic needs depending on the secondary organ to which they spread. Overall, the oncometabolism team aims to foster a comprehensive and multidisciplinary research program to exploit this knowledge and develop novel strategies to block the key metabolic pathways necessary for growth and survival of cancer cells.
Team members: Peter Siegel, Lawrence Kazak, Vincent Giguere, Daniela Quail, Arnim Pause, Nahum Sonenberg, William Muller, Imed Gallouzi
Tumor Microenvironment
A growing tumour is composed not only of cancer cells but also contains stromal cells (fibroblasts, endothelial cells and immune cells) and extracellular matrix components that are collectively referred to as the “Tumour Microenvironment”.
The tumour microenvironment has important effects on how tumor cells initiate and grow and can influence how “aggressive” or metastatic cancer cells become. We are now learning that the tumour microenvironment can affect how cancer cells respond to current treatments and can play a major role in the development of therapeutic resistance.
The goal of researchers at the Goodman Cancer Research Centre is to understand how the tumour microenvironment changes how cancer cells grow and metastasize and how we can exploit this knowledge to devise strategies to target the tumour microenvironment to improve cancer treatments.
Team Members: Peter Siegel, Morag Park, William Muller, Daniela Quail, Nicole Beauchemin, Philippe Gros
Cancer Systems Biology
Cancer is not one but many very distinct diseases. The scientific community has learnt this much during the era of genomics, quickly realizing that from each cancer site (breast, brain, colon etc…) could emerge an important diversity of cancer sub-types. Each of these cancer types has its own etiology and inherent behaviour. Accordingly, a therapeutic approach that works well for one of these types of cancer can work poorly or not at all in other cancer types. Personalized medicine, or precision medicine, bets on the potential of specifically targeting each of these cancer subtypes with a specific therapeutic approach.
To do this, one needs to understand the enemy. How are genes, gene products, their organization and functions altered in each specific cancer type? To really answer these questions, it is necessary to integrate complex datasets from various sources into comprehensive models. Integrating big data from genomes, proteomes, interactomes, metabolomes and trancriptomes is challenging, yet holds the potential to provide some of the most important keys for understanding cancer. This is cancer systems biology.
Team members: Thomas Duchaine, Ian Watson, Vincent Giguere, Morag Park, Logan Walsh, Sidong Huang, Imed Gallouzi, Peter Siegel, Lawrence Kazak, Philippe Gros, Alain Nepveu