Chemotherapy

As a medical oncologist, I specialize in treating about five cancer types, and the main focus of my current research is in bladder cancer. I’d like to describe a couple of the clinical trials we have been involved in lately.

The first is a study comparing new immunotherapy treatments to our current standard of...

As most people know the population in the Fraser Health region, in particular Surrey, is steadily growing. This has provided some wonderful opportunities for residents, but also presents a number of significant challenges for health care delivery in the region. This is not a new problem, indeed the rapid growth of the population and the increasing cancer care needs led to the opening of the...

Last week I blogged about what led me to study blood cancers and how they come about. This week, I will update you on some our previous work, and the work that is currently being supported by the BC Cancer Foundation.

A number of years ago, my lab became very interested in learning about a kind of blood cancer called myelodysplastic syndromes, or MDS. This cancer starts out slowly, but...

My path to a career in science and medicine was convoluted, but not without direction. I grew up in east Africa on an island in the Indian Ocean. Both my maternal grandparents died at very young ages of undiagnosed conditions. While the setting was idyllic, the reason for my grandparents’ deaths, or rather the lack of a reason bothered me.

This great gap in understanding—the causes of...

In this week’s blog posts, I’d like to discuss some of the exciting developments in new drug therapies for pancreatic cancer.

Pancreatic cancer has been one of the most difficult cancers to treat because it is difficult to detect early and is resistant to most chemotherapy drugs. Up until recently, very little progress had been made in finding new, effective therapies for pancreatic...

I’ve been lucky in my career to be part of research that has resulted in major advances in the treatment of prostate cancer.

When I first started as an oncologist, there was only one treatment for advanced, hormone therapy resistant prostate cancer – it was a chemotherapy called mitoxantrone, which although well tolerated, only produced a modest improvement in symptoms with no survival...

At the BC Cancer Agency I wear a number of hats: first, I’m a medical oncologist which is a sub-specialist in the drug treatment of cancer. I’m further sub-sub-specialized in that I mainly treat patients with genitourinary (GU) cancers (cancers of the prostate, bladder, testis, kidney and adrenal gland).

I’m also a researcher and study outcomes, biomarkers, and conduct clinical trials...

Hello again - We had another important week at the BC Cancer Agency last week, including a province-wide meeting to discuss a new pancreatic cancer initiative. Any doctor in British Columbia will be able to refer complex patients to clinical rounds to get an opinion about the best way to treat the cancer.

This takes a lot of cooperation...

Hey folks – this has been an exciting week!

On Tuesday a group of us conducted a province-wide presentation of the results of a big international cancer conference held in San Francisco, January 16 to 18 this year. Then, on Wednesday, we had the chance to offer some patients with rectal cancer an exciting new study that we are doing in partnership with centres across the U.S. and Canada...

Hi! I am one of the Medical Oncologists at the BC Cancer Agency Vancouver Centre. When I introduce myself, I tell people that I am a chemotherapy doctor, but that is probably not quite true. Many of the treatments that I give are actually more “targeted” treatments that do not really fit the term chemotherapy anymore. We also call it “systemic therapy”.

I was born in Germany and grew up...