24-S208 Cancer Fundamentals: From Cell Biology to Modern Treatment – Mary Hitt
This course will provide an introduction to the biology of cancer at the cellular level with an emphasis on normal biological processes that have gone wrong in cancer. These processes include cell division, cell death, DNA repair, spread of cells to distant tissues, recruiting blood vessels to feed the tumor, and avoiding attack by the immune system. We will also briefly touch on cancer screening and imaging, and highlight the rationale for and effectiveness of therapies such as chemotherapy, radiation therapy, targeted therapy and immunotherapy. This course is suitable for participants with knowledge of biology at a high school level. If possible, the class will have a tour of a state-of-the-art research lab on campus that has recently developed a novel cancer screening technique.
Instructor: Dr. Mary Hitt
Mary Hitt is an associate professor emeritus, recently retired from the Department of Oncology at the University of Alberta. She obtained her PhD at the University of California in Berkeley (USA) in 1986, and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London (UK), the University of Washington in Seattle (USA), and McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She was assistant professor at McMaster University for a short time before moving to Edmonton in 2003. Her research focused over the years on the role that different viruses might play in causing and in treating cancer. She taught the course “Introduction to Oncology” for 15 years at the University of Alberta.
