Rebecca Gladdy

Overview

Soft tissue sarcomas (STS) are a diverse group of tumours derived from connective tissue (muscle, fat and bone). Current treatment of STS is limited primarily to surgical procedures (e.g., removing the sarcoma), with selective use of radiation therapy and the use of conventional chemotherapy in some subtypes of the disease. Unfortunately, these treatment options are limited in their effectiveness and more than 50 per cent of STS patients succumb to this disease. Researchers have recognized that there is an urgent need to develop subtype-specific molecularly targeted therapeutics that can provide new treatment options unique to each histologic type of sarcoma.

The main goals of the Selective Therapies program are:

1. to identify targeted therapeutic agents through the use of high-throughput screens in collaboration with the Ontario Node of the Terry Fox Research Institute and the SMART facility at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute;
2. to develop faithful and genetically flexible mouse models of sarcoma as a tool to functionally validate genomic data and for pre-clinical drug testing;
3. to readily translate laboratory findings via clinical trials to sarcoma patients in Ontario.