Congratulations to Drs Wyatt, Chi and Fonseca on being awarded a three-year Canadian Cancer Society Challenge Grant - Sept 2021 competition for their project, Accelerating clinical development of plasma ctDNA fraction as a management tool in advanced prostate cancer.
Metastatic prostate cancer is incurable but recently approved treatments have increased the life expectancy. However, not all prostate cancers are equal as some people experience highly aggressive disease whereas others have slowly growing tumours. Unfortunately, there are no practical tests that can profile a person’s metastatic disease and estimate disease aggression. Dr. Wyatt and Chi's teams have developed a minimally-invasive biopsy technology that measures DNA shed by metastatic cancers into the bloodstream (termed ‘circulating tumour DNA’). In this CSS Challenge Grant project, the team will leverage this technology to evaluate whether the amount of circulating tumour DNA in blood is an accurate real-time indicator of the proliferative capacity of prostate cancer. The aim is to develop a circulating tumour DNA based computational model to predict life expectancy across different treatment contexts. This practical online tool will be freely available to physicians and provide a foundation for offering a more tailored management strategy to each person with metastatic prostate cancer.
Drs Wyatt, Chi & Fonseca awarded Canadian Cancer Society Challenge Grant
Date Posted:
2022-03-08