The Terry Fox Research Institute (TFRI) announced today that Dr. Jüri Reimand, OICR Investigator, has been granted the Terry Fox New Investigator Award to support his research into the evolution of glioblastoma, a deadly brain cancer that often recurs after treatment, with no long-term cure.

“This is a terrible disease with a dismal prognosis. It is usually fatal within a year or two after diagnosis and current therapies mostly fail to halt its recurrence and progress,” says Reimand. “We are taking a data-driven approach to see if we can change the tide on this disease by mapping the evolutionary history of each tumor and identifying genes and pathways that could be targeted through new or existing drugs.”

Backed by TFRI support, Reimand and collaborators are creating a robust multi-omics dataset derived from samples of glioblastoma tumours, including those that have returned after initial treatment. The dataset will incorporate many types of layered data from each sample including whole genome sequencing data, RNA sequencing data and proteomic data.

Reimand, who has expertise in integrating complex datasets, will develop machine learning strategies to identify new potential targets for treatment. The tools and methodologies will be designed to be applicable to other cancer types and will be made freely available for the research community to use.

“We hope that our expertise in computational biology can help shed new light on glioblastoma recurrence by analyzing tens of thousands of genes, proteins and RNAs in complex interaction networks, and ultimately provide a small number of high-confidence targets for further experimental work and therapy development,” said Reimand.

This research is enabled in large part by Reimand’s partnership with Dr. Sheila Singh, a clinician-scientist at McMaster University in Hamilton.

“We are routinely generating large amounts of complementary data utilizing different platforms that are difficult to compare,” says Dr. Singh. “This is why we are so excited to collaborate with Dr. Reimand to decipher GBM recurrence, as he brings invaluable expertise in computational biology, bioinformatics and machine learning. Dr. Reimand’s multi-omics integrative analysis will deliver our PPG with target genes, pathways and drug interactions that will help us to identify new therapies and understand the complex mechanisms of GBM recurrence.”

Read more about Dr. Jüri Reimand’s work.

This post has been adapted from the original announcement made by TFRI.