Jacob Scott, MD, DPhil | Stephanie Owen, PhD | Dagim Tadele, PhD

Taussig Cancer Institute

ALL CANCER TYPES

Magden Family VeloSano Pilot Award

Enabling Quantum Evolutionary Control In Cancer To Promote Drug Sensitivity

Cancer is already notoriously difficult to treat due to huge variation within cancers as well as between patients and cancer types. Yet cancer becomes even more deadly when it becomes resistant to treatment. Resistance is the result of the cancer trying to survive, evolving and adapting to the drugs we use to try and cure it. This pilot project aims to lay more groundwork for a possible solution to this dilemma, evolutionary therapy. Evolutionary therapy is a novel approach towards treatment that aims to understand the possible routes cancer can use to evade treatment in order to beat cancer at its own strategy. With enough information about how cancer cells work together to avoid treatment and pathways that cancer can take to avoid certain treatments, evolutionary therapy aims to force cancer down specific pathways of evolution to become a tumor we know we can treat and cure. This project proposes to carry out essential experiments and theoretical work required to begin to test this concept. We propose to develop a small model experimental evolutionary system using lung cancer cells. Alongside this we will develop the theoretical and computational models needed to inform us of the exact treatment regimes required for experimental validation of evolutionary therapy.

IN OTHER WORDS

This project aims to understand a possible solution to why cancer can be resistant to some treatments. We will use evolutionary therapy as a treatment to learn about the possible routes cancer can use to evade treatment in order to beat cancer at its own strategy. Once we can predict how a cancer works, we have the tools to potentially control what that tumor does to make more efficient drugs to treat patients.