A person’s body is made up of cells. Cancer is what happens when unusual cells come together as lumps or ‘tumours’. This project looks at cancer in the lungs. The lungs are the organs in our chest that we use to breathe. There are many ways to treat cancer. Sometimes, these treatments are given to some patients but not others. This is because the drug being used to stop the cancer is going to target a particular type of protein, and so we only give these drugs to patients who have this type of protein in their cancer cells. Sometimes, when one of these drugs is used, the patient starts to get better, but then their cancer comes back. The cancer cells have managed to keep growing even though the patient is being given the drug. This is referred to as the person’s cancer becoming ‘resistant’ to the drug, and it means that this type of medicine won’t help the patient anymore. We still are not sure how this happens for some drugs in some types of cancer. In my project I am going to be looking at targeted drugs called PI3K inhibitors. PI3K is the name of a protein that is involved in some types of cancer. To treat these types of cancer, we can try to stop PI3K from working, by using these inhibitors. I’m going to look for better ways of predicting which patients might benefit from these medicines, and which patients will become resistant to them.
