Kidney disease, says Dr. Sandra Turcotte, is “un peu sournois,” a bit sneaky.
Most people with a kidney tumour don’t realize it’s there until the disease has progressed to an advanced stage. By the time they see blood in their urine or experience back pain, the cancer has usually become so advanced that surgery to remove the entire kidney is the only real option.
Dr. Sandra Turcotte, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Université de Moncton, is working to change that. For more than 20 years, she’s been fascinated by how kidney disease operates at the molecular level. Her research could help develop alternative ways of both detecting and treating the disease.
A Curious Phenomenon with Great Potential
Dr. Turcotte, who is also Researcher in Residence at the Atlantic Institute for Cancer Research (ACRI), came to Moncton from Stanford University, where she made the discovery that has defined her career.
At the time, Dr. Turcotte was part of at team that was testing the effects of many different drugs on cancer cells. Staring through her microscope one day, she noticed something different about the way the cells were responding to one of the drugs, and she wondered what was happening.
Research discoveries are often like that, she says: “It’s something you just notice, and then, based on that, it sparks your curiosity, leading you to explore it further—and that can take you quite far.”
For Dr. Turcotte, her curiosity has taken her deep into the mysteries of how cancer spreads molecule by molecule.
Her research examines the way kidney cancer disables genes that would normally prevent tumors from forming. In the lab, she and her team are evaluating different therapies that could target and kill these mutant genes, which prevent the body from fighting the disease.
NB’s High Rates of Kidney Cancer Motivate Ongoing Discovery
Studying cancer in molecules is painstaking, time-consuming work. The groundwork Dr. Turcotte has been laying over the past two decades could eventually lead to new treatments for kidney cancer that are less toxic and more effective than radiation and chemotherapy.
The next stage of her investigation will be to develop three-dimensional models of kidney cancer cells so she and her team can mimic as closely as possible the way cancer behaves in a patient. Using patient tissue samples, they will grow mini organs (organoids) in the lab, which they’ll then use to test reactions to various drugs, gene combinations, or other novel therapies.
As Dr. Turcotte pursues her curiosity about kidney cancer further and further, her ongoing discoveries will be especially relevant to Atlantic Canadians, who suffer from kidney cancer at a higher rate than the rest of the country. According to Statistics Canada, in 2023, the rate for new cases in NB was 45% higher than the rate in Ontario.
Dr. Turcotte dreams of seeing her New Brunswick-based research program help heal other New Brunswickers. If NB leads the country in kidney cancer rates, it could also lead the way in creating innovative treatments.
She says, “It’s great to be able to treat people here. We want to understand cancer here.”
