Charbonneau master's students awarded 2025 CIHR Awards
Congratulations to our Charbonneau master's students who were awarded 2025 Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Awards.
Alyssa Federico
Supervisors: Dr. Joe Kendal, Dr. Michael Monument
Patients with sarcoma, a rare form of bone and soft tissue cancer, often require surgical tumor removal. It can be challenging to assess recovery after sarcoma surgery because of variations in surgical technique depending on the specific tumor type and location. Additionally, the surveys that are currently used to assess recovery mainly focus on physical function and do not incorporate objective measures of mobility. The Patient-Reported Outcome Measure Information System (PROMIS) captures patient symptoms across multiple health domains, such as limb function and pain, and may provide a more complete assessment of recovery. The overall aim of this study is to validate PROMIS in the sarcoma population, and to test a new smartphone application that collects both PROMIS surveys and mobility data. Read more
David Griffin
Supervisors: Dr. Doreen Ezeife, Dr. Aaron Goodarzi
Current lung cancer screening programs are cost-saving, but these screening programs utilize a risk estimation model that only assesses demographic data and smoking history. This results in individuals with a light smoking history whose risk is increased through exposure to environmental carcinogens being excluded from screening despite evidence that the current model underestimates incidence. This research aims to utilize a newly developed microsimulation disease model for Non Small Cell Lung Cancer that is capable of assessing interventions throughout the disease process. Read more
Camri Imlach
Supervisor: Dr. Douglas Mahoney
Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) is an aggressive cancer of the blood and bone marrow. The only established curative therapy for AML is a donor stem cell transplant, which relies on donor immune cells, called T cells, to kill the cancerous cells. Unfortunately, these same T cells attack the patients’ healthy organs, making the treatment risky for many patients. Relapse with AML remains common and the prognosis is poor, highlighting the need for safer and more targeted treatments such as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy. CAR T cell therapy, which engineers a patient’s own T cells to recognize and kill cancer cells, has transformed the treatment of several blood cancers. For AML, however, CAR T therapy has been difficult to use safely because most targets on AML cells are also on healthy blood cells. As a result, CAR T cell therapy can also kill the patient’s healthy blood cells, causing dangerous side effects. One proposed strategy explored to avoid killing healthy cells is removing the target on transplanted blood-forming stem cells, so that healthy blood cells become invisible to the CAR T cells, while the cancer cells remain recognizable. Read more
Kylie Jensen
Supervisor: Dr. Kristina Rinker
Breast cancer is responsible for a significant number of new cases and cancer-related deaths among women. While current diagnostic technologies like mammography and magnetic resonance imaging [MRI] have helped reduce this burden, limitations still exist such as high cost, low adherence, and poor accuracy when detecting early stage tumours. These challenges are especially prominent for underserved populations which include young women who don’t meet screening criteria, racial and ethnic minorities, and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds or rural areas. This highlights a gap in the current diagnostic process and emphasizes the need for better screening technology. Recently, there has been increasing interest in the use of blood tests to diagnose different types of cancer including breast cancer. These tests work by either directly identifying cancer in the blood stream, or by detecting the changes that occur in the rest of the body in response to cancer signals. This indirect effect that cancer has is called tumour education, and it is especially prevalent in immune cells, causing them to alter their normal behaviour and promote cancer growth. This research aims to understand how this process occurs in order to design a blood test that can recognize these changes and therefore accurately detect breast cancer, even at early stages. Read more
Jaden Lei
Supervisor: Dr. Joe Kendal, Dr. Frank Jirik
Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common bone cancer in children and young adults. It is a highly aggressive form of cancer that frequently spreads to the lungs, making it difficult to treat. OS is largely radioresistant, and current chemotherapy treatments have limited efficacy in metastatic disease. Survival rates have not improved in several decades, highlighting the critical need for new and effective therapies. OS can be caused by significant genetic disruptions. Loss of the tumour suppressor gene phosphatase and tensin homolog (PTEN) occurs in approximately 60% of patients, and this genetic event is strongly associated with higher rates of metastasis and poorer outcomes. Despite the devastating effects of PTEN loss, this genetic vulnerability can be exploited for targeted therapies. PTEN-deficient cancer cells are sensitive to the loss of the DNA repair enzyme polynucleotide kinase 3’-phosphatase (PNKP). Synthetic lethality is an interaction between two genes where cells survive if only one gene is disrupted, but disruption of both leads to cell death. By leveraging this interaction, PTEN-deficient OS cells can be selectively targeted while preserving normal cells. Read more
Jocelyn Peng
Supervisors: Dr. Jennifer Chan
CD276 (B7-H3) Tumor-Associated Antigen mRNA Vaccine for Glioblastoma
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and aggressive brain cancer. Most patients survive only about a year after diagnosis. Many immunotherapies that have been effective in other cancers have had limited success in GBM. This is due to GBM tumors being highly diverse, suppressing the immune system, and challenging for immune cells to penetrate. Vaccines that teach the immune system to recognize tumor markers have shown promise, but current approaches are difficult to manufacture or do not create strong enough immune responses. Recent success with mRNA vaccines, including those used during the COVID-19 pandemic, has shown that mRNA packaged in lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) can safely stimulate strong, targeted immune activation. We believe that this technology could be leveraged to help the immune system better recognize GBM tumors. Our goal is to test whether an mRNA-LNP vaccine targeting CD276, a molecule found on GBM cells (but rarely on healthy tissue), can prime the immune system to attack the tumor. Read more
Shahrbano Rukunuddin
Supervisors: Dr. Douglas Mahoney, Dr. Franz Zemp
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy is a cancer therapy where the body’s immune cells are modified to better recognize and kill tumour cells. Current research studies these therapies in mice without an immune system. Not only do these models lack immune cells that can inhibit the therapeutic CAR-T cell response, they also poorly represent safety risks that occur from overactivation of the immune system by these therapies. Thus, current approaches for studying CAR-T therapy frequently overestimate therapeutic efficacy and understate toxicity risks. This project aims to develop a more biologically relevant model for studying CAR-T therapies using mice equipped with complete immune systems. Read more
Haylee Robertson
Supervisor: Dr. Kevin Hay
Immunotherapy is a promising new avenue of cancer treatment that harnesses the power of the immune system to fight cancer. One type of immunotherapy, known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, has shown success in the treatment of blood cancers. This therapy involves extracting and genetically modifying the patient’s own T cells (a type of white blood cell) to contain a CAR that targets the cancer cells. Producing CAR-T cell therapy involves a rigorous manufacturing process that has reported failure rates between 1-13%. This is a concern for both clinical trials and commercialized CAR-T cell products as it leads to treatment delay, wasted resources and increases the cost of this already expensive therapy. This project aims to identify factors that are associated with manufacturing failures. Read more
Kate Yakubets
Supervisor: Dr. Ana Nikolic
Regulation of cellular quiescence in adult IDH-wildtype GBM
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and aggressive brain cancer in adults. Even with surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, most patients survive just over a year. A major reason for treatment failure is a small group of GBM stem cells (GSCs) that withstand therapy and drive tumor recurrence. Like normal stem cells, some GSCs can “fall asleep” by entering a long-lasting inactive state called quiescence. Most cancer treatments target fast-dividing cells, so these quiescent, non-dividing cells often escape therapy. After treatment, they can “wake up,” start dividing again, and regenerate the tumour. This plasticity makes glioblastoma particularly hard to treat. However, we still don’t fully understand what quiescent GSCs look like, what triggers them to wake up, or how they re-enter quiescence. Answering these questions could lead to more precise therapies and delay tumour regrowth. Read more
