Breast Cancer Society of Canada

My project focuses on studying breast cancer that spreads to the brain using patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models by using a special magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique to see which cells that spread to the brain die, which form new tumours, and which cells do not form tumours, but remain within the brain. This is my first year participating in fundraising efforts for the Mother’s Day Walk this year, and so I am excited to be part of communicating my experiences with the walk. This type of therapy involves collecting immune cells from a patient, attaching a protein that helps them to find and kill cancer cells, then placing these “trained” immune cells back into the patient where they can travel through the body and fight the patient’s cancer more effectively. Katie’s work focuses on combining iron based cellular MRI techniques with optical imaging to better track the fate of metastatic breast cancer cells in the brain and other sites throughout the body, with the overall goal of better understanding the mechanisms that lead to cancer metastasis and recurrence.

I work at the Robarts Research Institute under the supervision of Dr. Paula Foster to conduct research for breast cancer diagnosis using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Currently I am using a drug that gets rid of macrophages in order to monitor how this affects the growth and spread of tumours, and to detect these changes with a type of imaging called fluorine-19 MRI. 4. My undergraduate research involved the concept of imaging macrophages with MRI, for patients developing heart failure. My interest was sparked by Dr. Makela and Dr. Foster when they showed that aggressive breast cancers can be distinguished using fluorine-19 MRI. 7.

This opportunity provides me with a way to share my research with my peers, which could potentially lead to collaborative projects and further advancements in breast cancer research. The lung is one of the deadliest sites of breast cancer metastasis, especially for patients with an aggressive subtype of breast cancer call triple-negative (TN) disease. This would be made possible by identifying relevant molecular subtypes being investigated in my research for their tendency to spread, which can help clinicians with earlier detection, treatment, and/or prevention of lung metastasis in breast cancer patients. My proposed research topic answers a fundamental question in the breast cancer field, that may provide insight into how breast cancer spreads.

My research focuses on developing techniques to study a new kind of cancer therapy called chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell therapy. In the short term, the development of this cell tracking method will provide researchers with a method to study novel CAR-T cell therapies that may be able to treat breast cancer and decrease side effects. In the long term, we hope this project will provide a method for clinicians to track CAR-T cells in breast cancer patients to determine if the cell injection was effective and if the patient will respond to the treatment earlier. I am excited to work with a cancer cell therapy that may one day change the way we treat cancer, and I hope that my research can be a piece of the greater puzzle that allows that to be a reality.