Today's cancer treatment methods often employ a "shotgun" approach because we lack the tools to determine the cancer's next move. Taking advantage of the fact that cancer cells can hijack the body's normal wound healing processes provides us with insight into cancer cell behavior. By studying how cancer cells utilize the inflammatory pathway triggered by our treatments to proliferate and metastasize, we have developed a novel treatment that blocks these pathways to improve current treatments.
Encyt research has demonstrated that surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapies trigger a distinct cytokine response that is expressed within a narrow window of time after treatment. Furthermore, our work has confirmed that a group of distinct cytokines foster rapid stem cell proliferation and EMT in tissue culture systems. Based on this work we have focused on blocking these cytokines as a novel treatment for cancer in collaboration with our research partners the Dr. Szewczuk lab at Queens University.