More than gut instinct: High risk research can yield great results
Canadian Cancer Society’s Innovation Grant funds ‘innovation research’, which are vital to breakthrough ideas, it says
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Big risks can lead to big rewards and the field of cancer research is no exception.
Last year, Alberto Martin, associate professor at the department of immunology, University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair received the Canadian Cancer Society’s Innovation Grant. The grant supports “high risk ideas” that have the potential for high rewards in terms of impacting our understanding of cancer and generating new approaches to combat the disease, according to the CCS.
Martin and his team have, for the past five years, been studying gut bacteria in the colon and small intestine and how it contributes to colon cancer.
Gut bacteria cells outnumber the cells within our body by a ratio of 10 to 1. They help allow us to digest carbohydrates, but “they also have a dark side to them,” says Martin.
“There’s been a lot of interest in this area in the last two, three, five years. . . We’re learning a lot more about what types of disease they may be causing.”
People with inflammatory gut disease are typically predisposed to colon cancer. But Martin’s research looks at whether or not gut bacteria has a role in colon cancer that has no inflammatory component.
His team hypothesizes that changes in diet or treatment with antibiotics could reduce colorectal cancer; it could lead to the development of preventative protocols, including alterations in diet or anti-biotic use.
His results are currently under embargo, as they’re being reviewed by a top science journal.
Martin says funding like the Innovation Grant is harder to come by because of the nature of innovation research.
“There is a higher probability of failure,” he says. But at the same time, “these are the types of grants where the biggest leaps of science can occur.”
He points to two examples: the study of bacteria in volcanic events and the study of green fluorescent protein in jellyfish, both of which have revolutionized molecular medicine, he says.
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