Congratulations to Dr. Hagar Labouta, assistant professor at the College of Pharmacy, on her successfully acquiring funding from SickKids – Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) Institute of Human Development, Child and Youth Health (IHDCYH) New Investigator Grant for her project, titled Safe and Effective Targeted Therapy for Breast Tumor during Early Pregnancy.
Drug prescribing in pregnancy remains a complex issue for pregnant women and clinicians. For this New Investigator Research Grant, Dr. Labouta and her team aim to develop new effective and safe nanotherapies to treat pregnancy-associated breast cancer, a challenging clinical condition that currently lacks any efficient treatment option without fetal health concerns.
Specifically, her team will use microfluidic lab-on-a-chip models for designing the nanoparticles and will develop dynamic organ-on-a-chip models for evaluating nanoparticles under conditions mimicking the physiological environments.
“Funding of the proposed project will support the use of high-resolution tools and models, established in my lab, and will help establish my lab as a leading center of translational prenatal cancer nanomedicine research,” said Labouta of the importance of the project.