Personalized chemotherapy by quantification of drug-DNA damage

Patients undergoing chemotherapy often do not respond to the treatment, which results in suffering, waste of time that could be spent on better therapies and high cost to the medical system.  Currently, there are no proven technologies for predicting which patients will respond to chemotherapy.  We are developing a method to measure drug-DNA damage, which has the potential to predict chemoresistance in cancer patients.  Our hyposthesis is that low levels of drug-DNA damage will predict drug resistance.  Since DNA is the target of many chemotherapy agents, such a test may have broad applicability.  My project involves growing cancer cells on petri dishes, isolating  the DNA and exposing it to cisplatin, a commonly used chemotherapy agent.  The sites of drug-DNA damage will be detected using a proprietary antibody-based technology in collaboration with Life Technologies Inc.  Since antibodies recognize specific sites, called epitopes, the antibodies bound to the drug-damaged DNA can be easily measured and quantified.  If successful, this work may lead to improved cancer care by enabling personalized cancer therapy.