Genome Sciences Centre

Personalized Onco-Genomics needs to grow if we’re to fully address the cancer problem here in British Columbia.

Right now we have around 26,000 new cancer diagnoses in the province, and that figure is expected to increase as our populations continue to grow and age. Approximately 10,000 of those new cases will present themselves as metastatic disease, and that is a very big clinical...

The origins of POG

We chart the origins of the Personalized Onco-Genomics (POG) platform to an experience that occurred around 9 years ago. We had been building the capacity to sequence all 3+ billion letters of human cancer genomes. At the time there was a patient with a rare form of cancer that had been treated with surgery and radiation, but the cancer had come back...

Hello, my name is Dr. Marco Marra. I’m a distinguished scientist at BC Cancer, a professor of medical genetics at the University of British Columbia and the director of the BC Cancer Genome Sciences Centre. This is my first time blogging for the BC Cancer Foundation, and I look forward to updating our donor community on the progress we have been making with genome sciences generally, and...

Thank you to Dr. Connors for his insightful and informative posts this past month. It is pleasing to know that lymphoid cancer patients have some of the best outcomes in British Columbia thanks to the work taking place at BC Cancer.

I am delighted to introduce Dr. Marco Marra, distinguished scientist and director of the BC Cancer Genome Sciences Centre, to our blog for February. ...

My PhD was a veritable roller coaster of scares, successes, utter failures, exciting discoveries, disappointments, and a few seemingly insurmountable problems. The stakes are high in academic research, especially in hot areas such as cancer genomics.

Early in my degree, I was lucky enough to be in a position to make some...

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...

The GSC was a part of a large consortium that was producing resources and data to help better annotate the human genome. I started out with fairly blue-collar work that utilized my knowledge of molecular biology but didn’t initially require a lot of computational expertise. I eventually became involved in some work on piecing together reference genomes for some other organisms.

In my...