Breadcrumb

null Carlos Telleria, PhD

Investigator, RI-MUHC

Cancer Research Program

Professor, Department of Pathology, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, McGill University

 

Keywords

ovarian cancer • drug repurposing • consolidation cancer therapy • peritoneal carcinomatosis • tumor dormancy

Research Focus

My research focuses on studying ovarian cancer, which is the most lethal gynecological malignancy. Although diagnosis is often reached when the disease is highly advanced, 70% of patients respond to surgery and platinum-based therapy with remission. Unfortunately, the disease usually recurs with a platinum-resistant phenotype leading to a 5-year survival below 40%. Thus, innovative therapies for usage after standard of care are urgently needed. The overall therapeutic approach followed in my laboratory is to consider that the time between remission and recurrence can be exploited by using a chronic intervention to maintain residual ovarian cancer cells, which had escaped initial therapy, in a non-proliferative or “dormant” status. Within this scope, current investigations are tailored to understand the pathobiology of ovarian cancer within the microenvironment of the peritoneal cavity, to study the molecular mechanisms driving dormancy of cancer cells that had survived chemotherapy, and to exploit protein homeostasis and oxidative stress to develop therapies for non-dividing cancer cells.

Selected Publications

Click on Pubmed to see my current publications list

  • Goyeneche AA, Caron RW, Telleria CM. (2007). Mifepristone inhibits ovarian cancer cell growth in vitro and in vivo. Clinical Cancer Research 13: 3370-3379. PMID: 17545545.

  • Zhang L, Hapon MB, Goyeneche AA, Srinivasan R, Gamarra-Luques CD, Callegari EA, Drappeau DD, Terpstra EJ, Pan B, Knapp JR, Chien J, Wang XJ, Eyster KM, Telleria CM (2016). Mifepristone increases mRNA translation rate, triggers the unfolded protein response, increases autophagic flux, and kills ovarian cancer cells in combination with proteasome or lysosome inhibitors. Molecular Oncology; 10: 1099-1117. PMID: 27233943.

  • Lisio M, Fu L, Goyeneche A, Gao Z, Telleria C (2019). High-grade serous ovarian cancer: basic sciences, clinical and therapeutic standpoints. International Journal of Molecular Sciences 20, 952. PMID: 30813239.

  • Goyeneche AA, Lisio M-A, Fu L., Srinivasan R, Valdez J, Gao Z, Telleria CM (2020). The capacity of high-grade serous ovarian cancer cells to form multicellular structures spontaneously along disease progression is correlated with their orthotopic tumorigenicity in immunosuppressed mice. Cancers (Basel) 12, 699. PMID: 32188032.

  • Subeha M, Telleria CM (2020). The anti-cancer properties of the HIV protease inhibitor nelfinavir. Cancers (Basel) 12(11):E3437. PMID: 33228205.