Introduction
Historically cancer treatment has taken a ‘one size fits all’ approach. However, it’s clear that every cancer is different and being able to understand and anticipate differences in drug response, resistance, and efficacy of therapies at the cellular level may provide better treatment options.
In this webcast, our first presenter, Dr. David Andrews from Sunnybrook Research Institute, describes how personalized cancer treatment is being developed using high-content screening (HCS) in a Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) disease model. His research involves establishing imaged based screening techniques that report on multifactorial drug-responses of primary patient cells with the goal of personalizing cancer treatment decisions and drug-response monitoring.
Our second speaker, Dr. Elizabeth New from University of Sydney, presents her recent findings on the determination of elemental content of metal-based chemotherapies and nanoparticles in individual cancer cells using single cell–mass spectrometry (SC-ICP-MS) in order to better understand chemotherapy resistance as well as potential new therapies. Metal-based therapies are the most widely used class of drugs to treat cancers and quantification of their uptake to better understand interactions within an individual cancer cell can yield critical information on the effectiveness of the drug.