Erik Rolfsen Apr 1, 2025 UBC
Researchers at UBC’s faculty of medicine are using chicken eggs to study how childhood cancers respond to different treatments. Credit: Paul Joseph, UBC.
A pan-Canadian team has developed a new way to quickly find personalized treatments for young cancer patients, by growing their tumours in chicken eggs and analyzing their proteins.
A pan-Canadian team has developed a new way to quickly find personalized treatments for young cancer patients, by growing their tumours 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 tumour 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 pediatric cancer network ACCESS (Advancing Childhood Cancer Experience, Science and Survivorship) that brings together more than 30 research and funding organizations and over 100 investigators from across Canada to improve cancer outcomes for children and young adults.
The study by co-lead authors Dr. Georgina Barnabas, a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Philipp Lange’s lab, and Tariq Bhat, a PhD student in Dr. James Lim’s lab, focused on an unnamed patient diagnosed with a rare pediatric cancer that resisted conventional treatments.
