BC Cancer Research Centre

Thanks to the BC Cancer Foundation for inviting me to be their guest blogger this month. As I near retirement this is a good time for me to reflect on the 37 years I have spent at BC Cancer and all the progress we have made in understanding and managing lymphoid cancers in that time.

I grew up on Cape Cod in Massachusetts and received all of my education in the United States, including...

There is much to look forward to with regard to cancer research and care here in British Columbia. My primary hope would be to improve our ability to provide the right treatments to patients much earlier than we are able to now.

For the most part, we still give a one-size-fits-all approach to large cohorts of patients, depending on the type of tumour they have. There is a need to...

We are very fortunate to have so many key visionaries at BC Cancer, who think big and outside the box as we work to solve the complex issue of this disease. As a result, our knowledge of cancer continues to grow, in turn boosting our ability to better prevent, detect and treat it.

One of the biggest trends over the past year has been our focus on building the infrastructure to expand...

Hello,

My name is Dr. François Bénard, and I’m the Vice President of research at BC Cancer. It’s a pleasure to return as guest blogger for the BC Cancer Foundation as we wrap up 2017. A number of achievements have been made to move the needle this past year and I’m excited to discuss them with you this month.

First – a little about me. In my role as Vice President of research,...

As I touched on last week, the importance of the BC Cancer Foundation and its donors cannot be overstated when it comes to fuelling new and more effective treatments for breast cancer. In large part because of this, I expect to see a significant shift in the way we diagnose, treat and manage patients facing this disease in British Columbia.

Over the next ten years, I hope to see us...

Holding leadership roles at the BC Cancer Agency means that much of my time is spent in meetings and teleconference calls.

This may sound boring, but meeting with other physicians and health care practitioners is essential to delivering state-of-the-art, quality oncology care with a patient-centred approach, which is very important to all of us the BC Cancer Agency.

But...

Hello, I’m Dr. Kim Nguyen Chi, medical oncologist at the BC Cancer Agency – Vancouver Centre where I’m also the Regional Medical Director.

My specialty area is prostate cancer for both my clinical work and research activities. My research is focused on clinical trials and development of biomarkers. Clinical trials are research involving people with cancer where we are trying to...

The sequencers at the GSC were rapidly gaining improvements in read length and throughput. I spent my time working with the more interesting (and complex) types of data that could be generated, beginning with “transcriptomes” and then “exomes”.

Despite knowing I wanted to do a PhD, I had not yet been convinced of a project that I would want to spend the next three to five years on and...

For my first post I have been asked to spare you the details of my research, which is a tough thing to ask of any scientist! So I will start by giving you some context on how I got here.

As you will learn, I am a homegrown scientist. I was born and raised in Cumberland, a village on Vancouver Island that is too small to be officially referred to as a town. As many of us do in school, I...

Philanthropy and research is truly a partnership. We can have a lab full of talented and passionate researchers, but if we don’t have the dollars to fund the research, then the leading-edge discoveries that the BC Cancer Agency has become renowned for wouldn’t happen. There are lots of examples, but I will highlight one—OVCARE—BC’s Ovarian Cancer Research Program.

Traditionally,...