Colorectal cancer

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...

As this is the week leading up to Christmas, I would like to wish everyone all the very best over the holiday season. Each year working at the BC Cancer Agency has been a new adventure and I am grateful to work here. Every person who is treated at the Agency has the opportunity to exceed their potential and it is a privilege to experience this every day.

It’s also the perfect time of...

I am actively involved in clinical research at the BC Cancer Agency, including being an investigator in several gastrointestinal cancer clinical trials for patients, and as such am fortunate to be able to help with...

Thanks to the BC Cancer Foundation for inviting me to be a guest blogger!  I am a medical oncologist at the BC Cancer Agency Vancouver Centre, specializing in gastrointestinal cancer. I look forward to posting over the holiday season.

I grew up in Vancouver, and my interest in science started when I was in elementary school, mainly due to trips to the library where I read books on do-it...

Thank you to our November guest bloggers, Dr. Robert Holt and the immunogenomics team, for sharing how their exciting work with DNA analysis is helping to make immunotherapy-based treatments most effective.

This month, we’re pleased to welcome Dr. Howard Lim, a medical oncologist at the BC Cancer Agency. Dr. Lim’s research focuses on uncovering new...

Hi - this week I was hoping to talk a little about how cancer treatment may look five years from now. Honestly speaking, that is something that is really difficult to predict. One of the remarkable things about science and research is that you really do not know where it is going to take you. We often try a treatment for one type of cancer and then it ends up working for a completely different...

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...

March is colorectal cancer awareness month, and since colorectal cancer is the third most common type of cancer, and the second leading cause of cancer death, it’s certainly an important cancer to be aware of.

Often, colorectal cancer is diagnosed at a later stage, when it is harder to treat.  But if it’s detected early, the survival rate for colorectal cancer is over 90 per cent....