A University of Alberta researcher's work to identify patients at greatest risk of prostate cancer cells spreading to another part of the body has earned a top award at a showcase of the world's best up-and-coming research talent.
Lian Willetts' presentation on prostate cancer metastasis earned her second place in a field of 100 scientists from across the globe who gathered in Berlin Nov. 8 and 9 for the Falling Walls Lab finale. Part of her prize included the opportunity to present in front of 700 guests on the large stage of the Falling Walls Conference, sharing the spotlight and attention with Nobel laureates and ground-breaking researchers from all disciplines of science. This international conference offers young scientists, entrepreneurs and innovators a stage to pitch their research ideas to their peers and a distinguished jury of academics and business leaders.
Willetts, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry oncologist John Lewis, was one of three researchers representing the U of A at the finale after she had previously won the university's Falling Walls qualifier competition held Sept. 30. Her innovative work to predict whether patients have aggressive and invasive or non-aggressive disease is being accomplished through a non-invasive blood test, as opposed to a biopsy, which is the current standard of care.
"Men don't die from prostate cancer. They die when the cancer starts to spread," says Willetts. "Using our technology and platform, we have been able to identify a lot of the indicators that would reveal the state of your cancer and if it will spread. In this sense we can provide a very accurate and predictive technology for patients who will be diagnosed with prostate cancer. This paves the way for increased survival, and most importantly, the quality of life of these patients."
Willetts and Lewis are currently honing the test to better determine its predictive accuracy over a longer period of time in a much larger cohorts of patients from multiple prostate cancer centres around the world. If all goes well, they hope to have it available for clinical use in the next few years.
"There are many men out there that get a diagnosis of prostate cancer that never would have killed them, but they still opt for radiation or surgery," says Lewis, the Frank and Carla Sojonky Chair in Prostate Cancer Research at the University of Alberta. "This can severely compromise their quality of life. I think the biggest benefit of this test will be in determining which patients can feel comfortable making the decision to forgo aggressive treatment and just monitor their disease to live with it over the long term."
This is the second year in a row that a U of A researcher has placed in the top two. Nermeen Youssef, also a graduate student in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, placed second in 2014 for pitching her idea of using blue light to stimulate engineered fat cells to secrete insulin—an idea that could lead to needle-free management of Type-1 diabetes.
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