Dr. Laurie Ailles receives New Investigator Award to bring cancer stem cell expertise to Ontario
Dr. Laurie Ailles
Dr. Laurie Ailles, a rising star in the exciting field of cancer stem cell research, has returned to Ontario and received an Ontario Institute for Cancer Research Investigator Award. She will contribute to the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) Cancer Stem Cells Program.
Ailles started working as a scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute’s Division of Stem Cell and Developmental Biology earlier this year. She chose to return to Ontario early in her career as a principal investigator because it has one of the largest and most respected concentrations of cancer stem cell researchers, and because of the province’s broader commitment to cancer research.
“The Discovery District in Toronto is an exciting place to build my career,” says Ailles, whose research is funded in part by an OICR Investigator Award. “Ontario’s vision for cancer stem cell research, and for cancer research generally, is the most impressive I’ve seen anywhere. I think the programs OICR is investing in and the way they are arranged is going to lead to some really significant discoveries.”
A native of Windsor, Ailles graduated from the University of British Columbia with a PhD in Genetics in 1999. She completed postdoctoral fellowships in gene therapy at the Institute for Cancer Research in Candiolo, Italy and in pathology at Stanford University in California. She also worked as a research associate and later as a senior research scientist at Stanford before relocating to Canada.
In Ontario, Ailles will work closely with Dr. John Dick, the Toronto-based scientist who originally proposed a “cancer stem cell hypothesis” in the 1990s. The idea is that cancer originates with a rare subset of cells which divide to form regular cancer cells, leading to solid tumours and cancers of the blood. Dick and other scientists have since verified the existence of cancer stem cells in some cancers.
Dick is now leading OICR’s Cancer Stem Cell Program, which will continue identifying and differentiating cancer stem cells with the eventual goal of designing treatments that target them specifically. Cancer stem cells may be resistant to conventional treatments, which would explain why some tumours come back after being destroyed with radiation and chemotherapy.
Ailles has identified a marker for head and neck squamous carcinoma that allows her team to extract cancer stem cells, which can be divided into subsets and assayed for tumour-initiating potential. She now plans to study the biological properties of cancer stem cells and the signalling pathways that promote cell self renewal. Ailles’ work could help identify therapies with the potential to zero in on and eliminate cancer stem cells and thus limit tumour growth.
