An inspiring teacher who died from ovarian cancer prompted Victoria Bentley to see if she could use her scientific knowledge to find a new treatment for the disease which is the fifth-highest cause of cancer deaths in Canada.

Knowing that ovarian cancer grows in response to the hormone estrogen just like breast cancer she wondered if Tamoxifen — the breast cancer treatment drug– would also suppress ovarian cancer cells. The sixteen-year old Halifax student applied Tamoxifen to human ovarian cancer cells which made them “supersensitive” to levels of estrogen. Instead of the hormone causing the cancer cells to proliferate, it inhibited their growth she said.

Tamoxifen is not approved for use for ovarian cancer and there is a lack of concrete evidence that it could work until now says Bentley.

“It’s surprising that something that I showed to be a viable treatment option was not recognized as such by such important institutions as the US FDA.”

Equally surprising perhaps is that busy with piano lessons and practice, national debating contests and school that the Grade 11 student had time to do medical research.

Her experiment also uncovered a potential new tool for assessing the effectiveness of ovarian cancer treatments. Bentley explains: “I demonstrated that the expression levels of progesterone receptors are linked to cancer cell inhibition.” In other words, if the cancer treatment is working then progesterone receptor expression changes.

“The practical applications of biotechnology are astounding, and I think that this is an amazing field of work” she says.

“This project also exposed be to the thriving biotechnology sector within Nova Scotia, which I really wasn’t aware of up until now.”

Her mentor was Dr. Michelle Mujoomdar, post-doctoral fellow, Department of Biology, Dalhousie University.

(l-r) Dale Yakutchik (sanofi-pasteur), Victoria Bentley, JP Deveau (BioNova)