PATHOLOGY

Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine Magazine

Karsan Lab

Dr. Karsan Named New Canada Research Chair

— Aly Karsan, MD
Distinguished Scientist, Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, BC Cancer Research Institute
Professor, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Medicine

With support from the CRC program your work will have significant impact, especially in the fields of blood cancers. Where are you heading in with your research and what do you hope to have achieved by the end of your Canada Excellence Research Chair tenure?

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a deadly cancer of blood cells with an overall 5-year survival of ~30% (10% in those >60 y.o.). Resistance to therapy is the major cause of death. Work from our lab and others points to a key role for epigenomic and post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms in driving therapy resistance. AML is propagated by rare leukemic stem cells that are able to evade most current toxic and targeted therapies. Within an individual patient these leukemic stem cells are genetically heterogeneous, with as many as 30 different clones. This heterogeneity necessitates the integration of single cell omic assays as well as single cell functional assays to understand the mechanisms of therapy resistance in AML.

My research program will focus on unraveling the mechanisms that lead to primary therapy resistance and relapse in myeloid cancers, identifying strategies to overcome treatment refractoriness, and translating these findings into the clinic in order to improve outcomes of patients with myeloid cancers. To achieve our goals, we will continue to use technologies that span the breadth of omic and in vitro and in vivo functional analyses. We have developed or optimized unique single cell sequencing and single cell functional techniques to understand clonal architecture, RNA networks, and epigenomic state in the development of myeloid cancers, using patient samples and in vivo isogenic and patient xenograft models. Our research will incorporate the role of human aging and the microbiome on myeloid cancer development and therapy resistance. We hope that the combination of these unique approaches will result in clinically translatable new knowledge that has potential to make transformative changes in clinical testing and therapeutic approaches to myeloid cancers.

Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Blood Cancers, Professor, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine