Type of cancer: triple negative breast cancer
Patient material is hypothetical and it could be anything that has a lab based material
2. ABSTRACT (<150 words, not included in word count)
Include a brief but clear, relevant and balanced coverage of the key aspects addressed in your study design. It should be written in a clear, concise and focused manner.
3. INTRODUCTION (~600 words)
Provide sufficient background information to the study and give a balanced justification for the purpose of your work. It is essentially a description of why you carried out the study.
It should include a brief review of previous relevant work (supported by references) and identify gaps in the knowledge and scientific/clinical challenges.
Thus, while writing your Introduction, you should consider the following questions:
‘Why is it important to look at the topic in question? What is already known in this area? Where are the gaps in the knowledge? What is novel and new about your study?’
Your Introduction should lead you to the aims and objectives of the study.
4. AIMS (~100 words)
Briefly describe an overall rationale of the entire scientific/therapeutic/clinical area relevant to your study and clearly justify its importance indicating potential impact and benefits. This rationale should follow logically from your Introduction.
Introduce the specific aims of your own study, which will be focused on resolving a specific key question in the overall research area.
Aims should be a simple and focused statement of what the study will achieve. Give a clear explanation how your work may contribute in resolving the overall challenge.
5. Methodology: study design (~600 words)
The workshop on research methods will be very useful for this section.
State the methods you will use to address the scientific question.
You will need to be concise in presenting study design/experiments to use, so try to avoid including irrelevant or insignificant details.
You will receive marks for justifying the methods you have chosen i.e. demonstrating why those methods are the most appropriate to answer you aims and overall objective of the study.
At least some of your methods must make use of available material from patients with that specific cancer.
Important note: You can also use methods that don’t use patient material such as mouse models or cell lines.
Combining methods that use both patient material (e.g. patient biopsies) and pre-clinical material (e.g. cell lines, mouse models) may well be the most methodology to answer your specific research question.
Anticipated results of the study (~500 words)
State the anticipated results of the study, if successful.
What would successful, meaningful, usable data look like?
What would the ideal outcome of the study? The benefit of not doing this study in real life is you can assume all your proposed experiments will work.
Anticipated results can be presented in several ways e.g. figures, tables, graphs, statements.
Use a peer reviewed paper as a guide for how results of your type should be presented.
Caution – your anticipated results must feasibly be able to be generated from the methods you have used.
You cannot state results that are not possible from the methods you have chosen.
7. DISCUSSION (~600 words)
Provide a clear and concise comparison of your study design to published work (i.e. other similar studies in other cancers and other studies in your chosen cancer).
Explain what the anticipated results of your study mean. How does your study advance the field?
Extrapolate with care beyond this study, but only when you can reasonably argue the case – try to avoid any unfounded speculations.
Distinguish between statements which are based on evidence (e.g. experimental or clinical data) and those which represent your own thinking or opinion.
Put key findings into context with existing research, implication and/or hypothesis.
7.1 CLINICAL IMPACT OF THE PROPOSED RESEARCH (~200 words)
Give a brief, concise and focused summary of the key impacts of the proposed study indicating novelty and scientific and/or clinical impact.
Additional information that might help explain the assignment:
Design a study with the potential to make a difference for patients living with cancer
Must involve a cancer of unmet need
Study must use patient material
Methodology must be laboratory-based
Study can be clinical or pre-clinical work
How can we help treat cancers of unmet need?
Better understand the biology of the disease
Earlier detection
Develop better methods to track onset, progression and treatment response
Develop new therapies
Use existing therapies for the first time in these cancers
Use cancer-biology-informed new combinations or scheduling of drugs
Determine what is the unmet need in your chosen cancer (triple negative breast cancer) and what part of that unmet need you want to address What has been tried so far?
What do we still need to know about this cancer?
What do we still need to achieve for this cancer?
The answers to these questions are your “unmet need” and the research question/purpose of your study
